Demo Play Thursday - Epic Mickey: Rebrushed On PS4

For this week's Demo Play Thursday i played the PlayStation 4 version of Epic Mickey: Rebrushed from Purple Lamp.

Even tho i had a Wii, i never actually played it before. back then, whilst the idea was very popular there were many complaints about the execution and i wasn't into Disney enough to give it a go. But with this "Rebrushed" version, i was curious if they could not only make it look modern but also feel modern.

One thing i bring up a few times throughout this video is how slow it feels whilst Mickey looks to be going so fast. it must be that the levels are big and Mickey is small, but even when running there's no great sense of speed. i would go so far as to say that the running speed is closer to what i expected the walking speed to be. The only other minor complain i have about how it feels to play it is that sometimes it was difficult to judge jumps. once or twice it was because the camera got in the way, but other times it was a mix of the lack of speed and difficult to spot shadows making it hard to judge 3D space.

there is a lot of other things that this did well. graphically, i was impressed. it doesn't feel like the Wii version but HD, it looks like they went through the game and re-did a lot, if not all, of the assets. the controls are good, the music is good, and everything is nice and clear. If this was the version that came out originally, i probably would've tried it.

But i still came away with many questions about this game. i feel like the game doesn't talk about the consequences of our actions. as i say in the video, there's a disconnect with it being a Disney game and us having the ability to destroy the world. it feels wrong, it feels like there's a morality system at work that the game doesn't reveal. i felt like i was second guessing myself, wondering if i should be creating, that in doing so i would get a better ending. the same applies to the enemies. we can destroy them or make them our friends. then the demo introduced a guardian system that gives us one use guardians, but we need to create or destroy to get a guardian of that type. It honestly felt like the game was adding too many mechanics to the game when all i was interested in was the story.

So whilst it is an effective demo, after playing it i'm not interested in getting Epic Mickey: Rebrushed. i do recommend people try it. but for me, it just didn't do enough to answer all the questions i had about the game.