Warren Spector, head of Junction Point Studios, is more famous for Deus Ex and System Shock than anything else. Fans were a bit baffled when Spector announced his next project, Epic Mickey, but it’s not as big a surprise as it sounds at first. Spector had entertained the possibility of becoming an Imagineer for Disney, but video games offered him a paycheck sooner, making it a bit more of a dream team than a left-field surprise.
Epic Mickey is one of the most anticipated games coming to Wii aside from Nintendo’s first-party offerings, and a short playthrough of the demo available at E3 makes it easy to see why.
The game takes place in the land of rejected and forgotten Disney characters, the Wasteland. It calls on Disney images from every corner of the archives to make a living, breathing world. Like those old cartoons, it sometimes feels as it everything in the game has a heartbeat. The game switches freely between side-scrolling and 3D platforming and while the two look very different, both are gorgeous. The side-scrolling sections show off the best art in the game, once again making gamers wish for WiiHD.
All the mechanics of Mickey’s world came very naturally. The platforming is handled well, and the couple times I managed to “puddle” (kill) Mickey, it felt like it was my fault. The big deal in Epic Mickey, though, isn’t the platforming. Rather it’s the idea of paint and thinner, creating and destroying.
That mechanic shapes everything that happens in the game from combat and platforming to puzzle solving. Of course in any Warren Spector game, “Playstyle Matters,” and Epic Mickey is no different. On a moment-to-moment basis, players decide between turning enemies into friends or puddles of ink; bringing life back into the Wasteland or clearing the quickest path. Using lots of paint nets the player a paint sprite that floats with Mickey to help in combat.
The mechanic is pretty binary, but the nature of the Wii remote actually makes this feel appropriate rather than shoehorned as it does in some role-playing games. As Spector explains in one of Nintendo’s Iwata Asks videos, the remote trigger sprays paint while the nunchuck trigger sprays thinner. Aiming felt a bit finicky when firing at very close objects, but not in any way that really interfered.
The only thing that really hurt the demo was the nature of the demo itself. Epic Mickey is going to thrive on the variety of the levels and imagery it presents, and how Mickey’s brush can interact with each new place. The demo shows only the prelude to one of those levels, but the hints in that level are encouraging.
Epic Mickey is set for a Holiday 2010 release.
