Platformers built on the intuitive thrill of leaping across floating platforms toward a goal have branched out in all sorts of directions over the years. You have the genre's granddaddy Super Mario, Sonic chasing breakneck speeds, and Hollow Knight bringing a level of malicious difficulty that practically earns it the 2D Souls-like label.

And, of course, no conversation about the genre is complete without Ubisoft's flagship series, Rayman. There was always something delightfully distinct about its breakneck momentum combined with a rhythmic, almost musical sensibility. Released back in 2013, Rayman Legends delivered puzzle-like thrills by having players team up with Murphy, the frog wizard, to manipulate various environmental gadgets scattered across stages.

Thirteen years later, the remake title Rayman Legends Retold aims to push that design philosophy even further. We recently caught a glimpse of it through a media preview event, spending about two hours across a few distinct zones: the wonderfully Mexican-themed Mystic Mesa Realm, the industrial, underwater-facility-inspired The Iron Shell Realm, and a brand-new addition called Land of the Livid Dead.

Rayman Legends Retold follows Rayman and friends as they set out once again to rescue their world from the dastardly Dark Teensies, tracking down and liberating trapped Teensies scattered across the globe along the way.

This time around, the game runs on Ubisoft's proprietary Snowdrop engine—the same tech powering The Division and Star Wars Outlaws. Naturally, the improvements go far beyond a mere visual polish. While Rayman remains fundamentally a side-scrolling platformer, Rayman Legends Retold introduces dynamically shifting camera angles that transition seamlessly from vertical ascending shots to top-down views, and even over-the-shoulder back-views.

These shifts fundamentally alter how momentum feels during play. Take sliding down a rope while gobbling up Lums (the game's collectible currency) as an example. While the original already captured a great sense of speed, Rayman Legends Retold shifts to a back-view perspective looking down from above, making the stage's verticality and depth pop while dialling the velocity up to eleven. It never feels disorienting, either; the camera glides naturally to match the flow of the action.

Opening up stages to fresh perspectives and angles has paved the way for entirely new content absent from the original release. Case in point: dragon riding, one of the set-piece climaxes. While the original featured a segment where players took down a giant dragon, this reimagining lets you hop onto the beast alongside the rescued Teensies and rocket through an action-packed escape sequence.

The engine upgrade really lets its technical muscles flex during these dragon-riding segments, where the camera pulls back into a third-person view as you blast fireballs to smash through enemies and obstacles. Holding down the attack button lets you charge up a heavier shot, while rolling left or right to snag Lums injects a burst of energetic, high-speed flight mechanics into the mix.

It essentially morphs the platformer into a full-blown shoot 'em up. Certain sections even flip the perspective into a top-down, vertical-scrolling bullet hell. Given that Rayman Legends has always worn its rhythm-game heart on its sleeve, adding arcade-style shmup combat feels like a deliciously cheeky escalation.

Of course, all of this is built on top of the rock-solid foundations of the original. Rayman Legends Retold remains at its core a demanding platformer where split-second jumps and precise gliding are mandatory for surviving punishing gauntlets. On top of that, you get to experience the joy of unraveling unknown worlds by combining forces with Murphy, the frog wizard, to interact with the environment.

The Mystic Mesa Realm we previewed leans heavily into a vibrant Mexican aesthetic. Highlights include a musical stage set to a lively Macarena beat, food-themed environmental gimmicks, and skeletons busting out samba moves. Along the way, Rayman gets shrunk down to miniature size or accidentally polymorphed into a duck, leading to plenty of chaotic mishaps.

Shrinking down lets you squeeze through tight crevices you could never normally enter, though it comes at the cost of reduced momentum. This is where Murphy steps in to carry the team. When Rayman hits an impassable wall of cake, Murphy simply gobbles it up in a flash to clear the path. Coordinating Murphy to secure pathways while driving Rayman forward forms the core loop of reaching your destination.

Just be careful: if you accidentally have Murphy eat a platform Rayman actually needs to stand on, you'll be left twiddling your thumbs waiting for the cake to respawn. In one unfortunate mishap, we accidentally swallowed a cake wedge supporting a caged Teensy, sending the poor fellow plummeting straight to the ground. Use Murphy wisely and you can wipe out enemy footing for a clever two-for-one advantage; get sloppy for a split second, though, and you'll wave goodbye to valuable Teensies and Lums. Impulsive speedrunning will only get you killed; you need to constantly weigh where to clear paths before making a move.

Beyond snacking on obstacles, Murphy can snip distant ropes to give Rayman a swingline or drop platforms over boiling pools of lava. Success requires your brain to map out Murphy's environmental manipulation while your fingers handle Rayman's precise timing in clockwork harmony. Just like the original, bagging every hidden collectible matters far more than mere clear times in Rayman Legends Retold, so take a breath and treat every room like a puzzle.

This cooperative puzzle-solving carries right over into The Iron Shell Realm, a shady underwater facility where Murphy takes on an entirely different set of duties. For starters, hitting scattered switches spawns moving platforms. More importantly, the facility is crawling with automated sentinels that blast deadly lasers the moment they spot Rayman, meaning you have to use Murphy to manipulate their field of vision.

If you need to sneak from left to right, for instance, you command Murphy to swivel a security camera away to the right, letting Rayman slip past into a blind spot. From there, you scurry beneath a platform that blocks incoming lasers, grab a safe pocket of space, and tilt the camera back left to open up the next gap. It effectively blends the traditional puzzle-platforming flow with the slow-burn thrills of a stealth action game.

Rayman Legends Retold places a much stronger emphasis on storytelling than its predecessor, delivering narrative beats in a far cleaner and more structured manner. Distinct realms feature cohesive, self-contained plots, complete with boss characters and key figures introduced early on to keep players hooked. Each boss encounter serves as a dramatic milestone punctuating Rayman's journey against a brand-new adversary.

All of these regions tie back into a massive central hub called the Tree of Tranquility. Flicking the right analog stick down lets you instantly leap to any stage within a realm or bounce out to the world map to explore somewhere else. Even the transitional corridors linking stages together double as secret-hunting playgrounds packed with Easter eggs and environmental dressing that sell the zone's atmosphere.

Clearing all the early realms unlocks the Land of the Livid Dead, a murky, menacing new zone. True to its status as the ultimate endgame area, it demands razor-sharp jumps, precise glides, and quick-witted puzzle solving. The core mechanic here involves unraveling massive magical vines scattered throughout the stages—shrinking them back to clear blocked doorways or uncoiling them to forge makeshift pathways.

Platformers like Rayman often look deceptively simple, but they demand lightning-fast reflexes that can leave newcomers high and dry. To ease that friction, the developers have introduced an optional crutch called Fairy Blessing—essentially an invincibility mode. Toggle it on in the options menu, and you'll hover through stages automatically shrugging off all enemy attacks. You also get Golden Hearts, which soak up two or three fatal hits that would otherwise send you straight to a game over screen.

Judicious use of these assists lets absolute novices find their footing in Rayman Legends Retold with minimal fuss. Turning on invincibility lets you scout out entire layouts safely and figure out where you're supposed to go without the endless trial-and-error deaths that usually define the genre.

You can start by using invincibility to learn the ropes, then switch it off later in favor of Golden Hearts once you've built up some muscle memory, letting you conquer challenges on your own terms. It's a brilliant way to gradually build your 'platforming muscles.' Best of all, the invincibility toggle sits right on a single button press, letting you flip it on and off in real-time to breeze through specifically frustrating bottlenecks.

As an extra cherry on top, Rayman Legends Retold packages in a fully 4K-remastered edition of Rayman Origins. While the original release of Rayman Legends tucked away a few select Origins stages as bonus content, this package gives the entire original game the full modern remaster treatment. During our preview session, we spent about 15 minutes checking out two full stages and a dedicated art gallery space.

If Retold is all about varied, high-concept gameplay, Rayman Origins keeps things refreshingly pure. It hones in squarely on the fundamentals: jumping, gliding, and smacking enemies while leaping across platforms. Jumping straight from Retold to Origins strips away all the auxiliary baggage, making older challenges feel surprisingly breezy in comparison.

The 4K remaster gives the art assets a gorgeous crispness, and tweaked handling makes the characters respond to pad inputs far more fluidly. Those quality-of-life adjustments definitely soften the perceived difficulty curve. You can even tap into Retold's Fairy Blessing mode here if you get stuck, though certain precision bottlenecks—like timing a leap through rapidly snapping rock jaws—will still demand exact timing if you want to avoid eating dirt.

All told, Rayman Legends Retold shapes up to be a cracking package. The Snowdrop engine grants the camera liberating new freedom, and punchy direction delivers thrills and narrative depth that simply weren't possible before.

Expect roughly 12 hours for a standard playthrough, though completionists hunting down every secret will easily double that. Alongside the main campaign, returning favorites like the Kung Foot mode, daily and weekly challenge boards, and local four-player co-op are all present and correct. The masochistic Invaded Level mode returns to torment hardcore veterans, while smart accessibility toggles look after newcomers.

Rayman Legends Retold launches on December 3 for PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch 2, Ubisoft+, and GeForce Now. It supports 12 languages including English, Japanese, and both Simplified and Traditional Chinese, though sadly in South Korea, local fans won't find Korean language support. Given that the original skipped it too, the barrier to entry remains relatively low, but it's a genuine shame that the game's newly beefed-up storytelling won't be fully accessible to local players in their native tongue. We can't help wishing Ubisoft had thrown in Korean subtitles while they were busy remastering the whole affair.