Rayman Legends Retold might actually be better than the original, and that's hard to admit

Rayman Legends Retold is a joint project from Ubisoft Montpellier – the studio that made Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown – and Ubisoft Milan, the team behind Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle. It swaps the original 2013 platformer's hand-drawn 2D art for full 3D animation, and yes, that announcement went down badly.

The level design is largely untouched. Ubisoft ported the original levels directly from the old UbiArt Framework engine into the modern Snowdrop engine, keeping layouts intact while replacing all the assets. The real work has gone into the connective tissue between levels. In the original, each world was a bare gallery corridor with picture frames as level entrances – a hub world that arrived over 15 years after Super Mario 64 yet felt far less coherent than Peach's Castle. Production director Alessandro Arndt Mucchi is candid about it: "It's a bit all over the place. There's a rich world there which we felt needed a new touch, because you don't really make sense of what's going on in the Glade of Dreams." The story – an evil magician stirring the nightmares of Polokus the Bubble Dreamer, whose dreams form the Glade of Dreams – was barely explained in the original beyond a brief opening cinematic. Ubisoft are fixing that with new fully-voiced cinematics that reportedly look like a pitch to give Rayman the Super Mario treatment in terms of world-building and character presence.