Reviews from

in the past


This game scared me so much as a kid.
It had this strange weird liminal feeling to it that's definitely by accident.
It's such a surreal experience.

Um Point-Click esquisito, tem uma ambientação e vibe medonha, é extremamente lento.

This game scared the shit out of me as a wee lad

THIS Was The Reason Why Mickey Was Barely In Kingdom Hearts 1????

One of my favorite childhood games! :3


Has an atmosphere I haven't seen replicated in any game ever but it's a shame this game controls like garbage and is insanely slow. Still have huge nostalgia bias though

theres a weird amount to love here beyond how obtuse and slow it is. mickey does a fuckin shoryuken, the camera angles are all cracked, the stock ceramic smashing sound is present. its literally little tikes clock tower. cannot decide what it wants to be and is better for it. mickey looks fucking demented man i swear to god. deeply strange.

Got it in sales for 15$ in 2002, it still costs 15$. I can't remember anything about this game besides it costing 15$ for 20 years straight. I don't think it takes 15 hours to beat this game.

this game made me shit myself with fear as a kid what were they actually thinking. the Zatch Bell gamecube game helped me cope it was a much better rental than this

Why does this whole game make me feel so uneasy? Nothing that scary happens in it.

This game has no business being as genuinely scary as it is

point and click horror game but with mickey mouse. it has this inexplicably surreal atmosphere that makes it utterly spellbinding. it's cryptic, but its dreamlike feel makes up for that

A Guantanamo Bay torture device disguised as a game.

Highly recommend making a friend play this.

Last year I began revisiting childhood games, finishing the ones I liked well enough and publishing some rough thoughts. Bringing attention to far off memories was wondrous, even when the games held up less-than-excellently. It’s as if I had the power to pluck unfinished dreams from my mind and play them to their conclusion. Finding new ways to appreciate what I once loved, and beating games I never had the patience or skill to, was magical. Writing about them was equally important, as I wouldn’t want them to turn into a loose memory again.

But I’ve been slacking lately, so here’s the next game :)

Disney’s Magical Mirror Starring Mickey Mouse is an absurdly long name. I don’t think I ever knew it was called that. The front cover doesn’t particularly help, as “Magical Mirror” and “Mickey Mouse” are so prominent, especially being the only words in color. Kiddo me called it Magical Mirror so that’s what I will refer to it as in this review.

Anyway, Magical Mirror is a point-and-click adventure inspired by the “Thru The Mirror” Mickey Mouse short from 1936. It involves interacting with environments seen through fixed cameras, collecting key items, and figuring out how to progress through a collection of bizarrely laid out rooms inside a massive castle.

It’s also a joint project between Capcom and Nintendo, which is bewildering; you’d think sticking those two studios in a room during the GameCube Era would result in an absolute classic, but this got dismal reception. IGN gave it a 4.8/10 and it has a 50/100 on Metacritic. Ouch.

But regardless of its awful reception, this inexplicably spoke to me as a kid. It probably helps that it came out when I was like… four years old, although I’m sure I retried it a couple of times during the years that followed. I also operate solely on v i b e s, of which this game has plenty. Sadly, like most things I played during my youth, I never finished it.

Regardless, my attachment to this game is intense. Its toy train section in particular has stuck with me; I recall exploring a kid’s room with wooden blocks making up a little station as a gorgeous orange glow gave it a nostalgic warmth. Stepping through a tiny hole in the wall and seeing another side of a makeshift train station as a miniaturized Mickey Mouse traveled between rooms collecting gold stars sits powerfully in my mind.

I was shocked when I got to that section of the game: All of that is technically here, but it is not present in the ways I remember. If you showed me a YouTube video of that scene, and I wasn’t sure what game I played as a kid, I would have definitively told you “no, that’s not the game.”

At some point between playing this and revisiting it, my memory got generous and filled in massive gaps, making it seem more imaginative. It’s a supremely small part of the world and while the train station is there, the memories I have of exploring an elegant, detailed rendition in third person was complete fantasy. It’s also possible I had a vivid dream expanding upon that part of the game and that’s what my brain decided would become the memory. Who knows!

It’s one of those classic examples of “I remember this looking better.” I typically don’t subscribe to that mindset, as I am a firm believer that old games look phenomenal, but I can’t deny I felt it during the earliest sections of this game. It’s the most I’ve ever been flabbergasted by my own rose-tinted glasses.

But it didn’t take long for me to reach new and unexplored regions of this mirror-realm. There’s a sort of bizarre, difficult-to-parse atmosphere here that speaks to me. I actually think it has an effectively playful adventurousness in its seemingly endless, maze-like mansion. Its several, minimally detailed rooms with few key props are a major vibe.

I loved the clock mechanism room, and I felt cozy stepping outside and seeing the 2D painted town in the background at the top of the tower. That joyous feeling is only enhanced by music full of dreaminess and light-hearted, goofy fun.

But it is not a pleasant game to play. Mickey Mouse takes forever to do anything, and the animations make him feel like he’s doing the Dora the Explorer thing where large pauses are used to try and get the viewer to answer some sort of question. But of course, there is no question, it’s just unnecessarily drawn out.

There's no intrigue to its point-and-click elements. You just move around environments and animations play out with few to no exciting puzzles; it's all very simple. I like its visuals and soundtrack so much that it absolutely saves it, but it's quite boring.

The mini-games are hilariously poor technically but they’re admittedly charming. Flying a toy plane and shooting little pellets at a giant rubber ducky, fireballing barrels rolling towards you, or dancing to a rhythm mini-game as your Mickey Mouse doppelganger does sick dance moves to an admittedly groovy track are all fun in concept. This game just does not have the execution, even if it’s cute to look at.

I like that the little ghost that’s been tormenting Mickey Mouse through the whole game seems genuinely upset when he has to leave. It’s classically wholesome to turn the “villain” into a cute little fella who just wanted to play. Mickey has no hard feelings towards him in the end. It’s very loving and precious :)

Overall, Magical Mirror kinda rules, but it kinda doesn’t. Any vibe-operated individual who doesn't mind a game playing like shit if they have an interesting experience won’t regret their time. I respect this game for its weird little rooms, but I can’t pretend I loved playing it.

Although… I did play it for four hours straight until completion in a single sitting. Impressive considering it’s very easy for other games to lose my attention fast. Dunno! Maybe the game does rule and it’ll grow on me as I forget how it played and remember more of how it looked and sounded.

This game was the original backrooms.

I almost feel like I can't give this game a rating. Even as a kid i distinctly remember being actively annoyed by it but yet its liminal nature really connected with me in the same way an oddly pleasant dream would. Having played this game a few years ago as an adult? Somehow the exact same experience. Obscenely slow paced and often obtuse and it leaves me feeling like I forgot something important on a metaphysical level. I know for a fact playing this game is borderline torture but yet my memories are injected with artificially positive feelings. Not nostalgia, I've felt this ever since the game came out. Like bro it's just a point and click adventure game with a pretty young target audience - why can't I beat it and why is it permanently latched onto my soul?

There's something devious here, I'd be careful with this one.

scarier than most horror games

I found this game in my 30s in a store and because it was a Disney game I had to buy it. Of course.

I wasn't expecting a point and click game. But after eccepting this I somehow enjoyed it.
It sure is for kids, so it's not that hard. You always have an idea what you have to do next. But from time to time it was tricky too.
I really don't like the genre because you often don't know what to do or have to combine things which not really make sense. But in this game all of this wasn't the case.
Because it was a game for children I guess, all things were clear.
Oh, what suprised me the most are the many movie references in this game.

Would I remmoned it? I guess not. But it wasn't as bad as I thought in the first few minutes.

this game scared me shitless as a kid

for the longest time, i was just convinced that this was a weird fever dream i had when i was 5

Despite all the fun interactions, The games way to confusing with it's objectives and have you constantly scratching your head wondering, " What am I suppose to do?"

david lynch wishes he could make movies this unsettling, Disney's Magical Mirror Starring Mickey Mouse was a pioneer of surreal horror in video games, it basically did everything Silent Hill 2 did but a year later and much more existentially dreadful.

the ghost and the player take turns tormenting mickey as his soul is trapped in an alternate dimension held within his mirror, the mirror, now shattered, must be pieced back together in order to restore the path back to his reality and body. maybe some sort of metaphor, maybe a kids game accidentally made way too unsettling. maybe both! i suspect we will never know.

i appreciated when the game gave me a choice between 2 modes of play: "kids" and "normal"

This review contains spoilers

ok

This game would make me laugh hysterically and I have absolutely no idea why.