Warren Spector’s been promising that Disney Epic Mickey–the first video game in years where Uncle Walt’s signature creation plays a lead role–will let players turn Mickey into, well, a poopyhead. Players can make a bunch of self-serving decisions that benefit only themselves and one guess that, once those choices compound on one another, Mickey will wind up being a pretty unlikeable character.
Mickey’s often been portrayed as impulsive, as a character who doesn’t always think about the consequences of his actions. It’s that very characterization that jumpstarts the main plot of the game. Mickey jumps through a Magic Mirror (the same one that appeared in Through the The Mirror) and finds himself in the study of the wizard from The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. The mystic’s been working on a sanctuary for barely-remembered characters Mickey snoops around the miniature model, which looks a lot lke a Disney theme park, and spills tubs of magic paint and thinner onto it. This accident forms the game’s big bad The Phantom Blot and Mickey manages to ward him off with the wizard’s Magic Paintbrush. As Mickey scampers through the Mirror back to reality, you can see that the Thinner Disaster’s affected him, too, and his essence seems to quiver uncertainly. A quick cartoon cutscene shows the years passing, where in we get to se Mickey’s many different looks as he becomes a movie star.
After the opening sequence recounted above, we jumped ahead to one of the early levels in the game. Aside from the standard run-jump-double jump patformer controls, the basics of interacting with the world involve paint and thinner. The magic paint will restore parts of the world undone by the Thinner Disaster, so stairs that have dissolved can get redrawn. And the thinner does the opposite, wiping away debris that may block a path. The game tracks your use of each dynamically and generates Guardians as a visual reference to show how you’re playing the game. The blue Tint Guardians appear when you use a lot of Paint and the green Turps (short for turpentine, natch) means you’re easing a lot of the world. Your in-game guide is Gremlin Gus, one of the older Disney characters lost to obscurity. The first level has you abducted back through the Mirror and winding up in the Mad Doctor’s lab. The evil scientist is another legacy Disney character and he’s got a character who looks a lot like Mickey caged up. You find out later that this is Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, Walt Disney’s first character who he lost the rights to. Disney created Mickey to replace him and in the game, Oswald’s been ruling as the king and has been trying to make the Wasteland safer after the disaster.
I’m here to report that the game doesn’t make you wait too long to reach one of the key decision point that will shape Mickey’s personality. Another early level has Mickey trying to fix decrepit theme park rides and he finds another Gremlin trapped in a cage. The choice Mickey’s presented with is to take a nearby treasure chest, which is keeping Gremin Calvin from being flung away or to save Calvin and lose the treasure. The producer on the game took the treasure and Calvin was catapulted violently offscreen. Gus then commented, “You just launched Calvin to who-knows-where for a treasure chest?! That’s not something a hero would do. Are you a hero?” It was made clear, though, that Calvin wasn’t dead and you’d meet him again and that he’d be pretty pissed at Mickey.
Even from my brief time with the game, I could tell that there’s a trove of Disneyana waiting to be unlocked and discovered. The cutscenes are done in the style of Mary Blair, a beloved artist and designer who worked on the It’s a Small World concept. And the music’s by composer Jim Dooley, who worked on Disney movies. I’m excited to see how Disney Epic Mickey presents the comppany’s rich legacy of art, design and animation to a whole new generation and to see just how malleable Spector and his Junction Point development studio are making Mickey.