Disney Epic Mickey: Rebrushed is a remake of Disney Epic Mickey, a cult classic that first appeared on the Wii ten years ago. In the original, you controlled the titular Mickey Mouse, who, armed with a magic paintbrush (which could be wielded by waving the Wiimote), could paint or rub surfaces to solve puzzles. It was the work of Junction Studios, headed by Warren Spector, best known as The Deus Ex Guy. No, unfortunately Mickey couldn’t nano-enlarge his paintbrush to better lock on to targets, nor could he fire laser-guided anti-tank missiles from his thick white mittens.

And no, Rebrushed doesn’t let him do any of that either. Clearly a missed opportunity. But is it better anyway? With an updated look, some additional secrets, more moves for Mickey, and controller/M&K support, long-time Mickey fans will love this nostalgia trip, I’d say. For total newbies like me, it’s a platformer that’s certainly charming and clever and wonderfully experimental, but also a bit boring in places.

The story of Rebrushed begins with a monumental mishap. Mickey is awakened by a magic mirror that transports him to the home of a wizard who appears to be painting a beautiful world on canvas. The wizard leaves pleased with his work, so Mickey says, “I should fucking smear some paint around, lol,” and does just that. Only in the process, he spills an entire bottle of paint thinner on the canvas because he’s an idiot. The wizard’s world is now in shambles and radiating evil energy. Mickey pisses off back into the mirror and the safety of his room. Remarkably, he then immediately falls back asleep as if nothing happened. Only then does karma catch up with him as he is dragged through the mirror by an evil hand back into the ruined painting.

And so Mickey is armed with the magic paintbrush he wrongfully picked up and tasked with repairing the world he has ravaged from the inside out. To be honest, I find Disney a bit shrugging (I preferred Dexter’s Laboratory and Hell In A Cell games to The Lion King as a kid), but I’ll admit that the game’s setting is nice. In that sense, it’s a world inhabited by Disney’s forgotten creations and misfits, which provides both an interesting look into an old catalog and a motivation: you really want to save these poor people.

As it turns out, this is best achieved through platforming, aided by “ho ho” double jumps and the ability to paint or thin surfaces. The latter is the problem here, as Rebrushed isn’t designed to be a platformer where movement is paramount. In fact, Mickey is a pretty lousy rodentkour, with his oddly floating falls and tendency to simply slide off edges rather than grab them. He also maintains the same mediocre moveset throughout his adventures, so don’t expect him to develop some Celeste-esque aerial leaps or Mario-esque hops and jumps.

Instead, Rebrushed focuses on brush waving. Using the mouse or your controller’s thumbsticks, you can easily and precisely control marked areas with paint or thinner: select the blue blob of paint and you fill in the spots, while the green blobs of thinner burn away parts. Again, you don’t develop any new brush waving skills, nor do you meet, for example, Daffio Vequackquez, who lends you new oil paints. Ultimately, the challenge and fun depend heavily on how each level is laid out.

On Mickey’s travels, you’ll pass through sewer slums, ruined theme parks with rickety rockets, crumbling ruins, fire-stricken cities, and pirate-infested islands. You move through these spaces at a pretty brisk pace, too, as each location is broken down into easily digestible mechanical puzzles. Almost all of them require you to tick things off a checklist: fetch masks, find switches, rescue friends. Much of what you’ll be doing is running around a room looking for the highlighted pieces to fill or thin out, which are often pretty obvious. You might need to flip a switch on the thingamajig, so paint some platforms to get to it. A chest might burn, so thin out the platform above it that has water barrels on it. In the best places, paint or thin out gears so they help you turn or hold platforms in place.

It’s all pretty simple and it’s hard to get really stuck, even for me. But I find the relative ease quite relaxing, and a testament to the design of each level. I like how you’ll often be given what sounds like a boring or intimidating “find the Xs and Ys” mission, but then find surfaces and paths highlighted or folded into one another in a way that satisfies natural curiosity. Or indeed the exploratory tendencies of someone like me who trots around and calls this a “vibes-based” problem solver. This gives each location a real playground feel as you splatter paint or thinner and randomly discover lots of optional secrets.

These 3D platforming main events are connected by other 2D mini-levels, a sort of portal to forgotten or lost Disney episodes. You might have to hop through Willy Doo: The Goose’s (I made up that character) steamboat as he fights whales (I made up that part too), in classic 1930s style with trumpets blaring and big-eyed figures bobbing. They’re kind of fun if a very easy test of double jumps, as there are no painting or thinning powers in these ancient realms. In reality, they exist to please Disney fans and easily educate laypeople, as they feel very much like they were levels designed for a pop-up booth at Walt’s museum.

After getting past these levels, you may end up in a few central areas that you’ll return to a few times throughout the story. The most important of these is Mean Street, home to merchants with simple side quests that will net you either 1) a collectible pin or 2) an orb. These pins are common, often as a reward for finding secret spots while thinning or painting things in the world, which infuriates me as a person who doesn’t care for them, but might satisfy those of you who love that sort of thing. Anyway, yes, there’s also a gremlin in Mean Street that asks you to grab him as many orbs as you need in order to open more portals to 3D levels and thus more obligatory mickeying.

However, the mandatory mickeying involves some interesting decisions that are more “interesting” than actually impactful—but still. At the most basic level, combat revolves around painting or thinning enemies. Painting them hard enough will make them friendly, while thinning them will just wipe them out completely (some enemies can only be thinned and then attacked with a spin attack). Some levels also have gremlins trapped in cages, where they might offer to repair or forge parts of the map to either make your path to the main objective a little easier or open up a room for yet another piss pin. Another time, I gave a pirate an ice cream to woo a lady he fancied, without asking what the lady might want. Apparently, she wasn’t into ice cream.

Many of the choices feel a little embryonic or experimental, like they haven’t been fully fleshed out yet: the ice creams and the gremlins and so on don’t really have a lasting effect. Some bosses can be defeated by either painting them or thinning them, though, in clever fights that require you to really balance paint, thinner and jumps to avoid falls or arm strikes. Whichever substance you choose will determine your fate, either as a corroded husk or a character saved from corruption. Save a lad named Petetronic and his regular counterpart Pete, a seller in Mean Street, would like “Good done” and give you a spark. So don’t expect any immediate, earth-shattering consequences. Instead, it’s one of those games where these choices are counted down by Dick Disney in the background, and a good or bad ending is chosen for you as soon as the credits roll.

As someone who doesn’t really get along with the source material, I find Disney Epic Mickey: Rebrushed very enjoyable. It’s not too demanding and sometimes a bit ehbut I liked that laid-back nature more than I loathed it. You can splatter paint around and stumble into cool mechanical puzzles, or just remove the floor from an enemy and watch them fall to their death. And while some of the side quests and optional treats aren’t much more than an end-credits sequence at most, I admire its adventurous spirit. You can tell it’s trying to do things a little differently than the usual platformer, and for the most part, it works!

This review is based on a trial version of the game provided by the publisher.