Sacrilegious as it may be to ’90s kids, I was never a big Sonic the Hedgehog fan. I watched some of the (terrible) cartoons as a kid, but never having owned any Sega consoles, the history of the franchise itself is lost on me. So when Sonic Mania Plus was touted as improving upon last year's Sonic Mania with the thrilling additions of "Mighty the Armadillo" and "Ray the Flying Squirrel," I was confused. Deep-cut character additions can be revelatory for hardcore fans; for someone who doesn't have the Sonic rings as their ringtone, though, I worried whether there would anything compelling about the update.
To my happy surprise, I found something very compelling indeed: a remix.
Games don't get remixed often. To remix a game the way one would a song—rearranging parts, adding in new elements, creating a renewed experienced that minimizes some parts of the original while emphasizing others—is a lot of work. The elements of a game aren't always recombinable, and the merged arts that contribute to a game are so fiddly that a remix can easily go awry, failing to capture whatever made its original inspiration work.
And yet even if it introduces new flaws, a good remix can be a thrilling means of encountering a fantastic game in an entirely new context. One of my favorite gaming experiences in recent memory is playing through Dark Souls 2: Scholars of the First Sin, a rejiggered version of the original Dark Souls 2 that moves around the enemies, adds new plot elements, and slightly changes the ending. It's a journey of discovery and surprise, the type of transformation that's able to make a familiar thing new.
Encore Mode, the centerpiece of Sonic Mania Plus, does the same thing for one of the best 2D platformers of the generation—and the game that won me over on Sonic in the first place. In additiong to tweaked color palette and stage designs, Encore Mode introduces the new characters, alongside the more familiar Tails and Knuckles, as consistent companions to Sonic. You collect these characters during the levels, and can switch between the two you've had for the longest amount of time. When one character dies, you don't start over—you just start as the next character. When you run out of characters, though, it's game over.
To further complicate this, each character has different abilities: Knuckles can glide, Tails can fly upward, Mighty has a powerful pound attack, and Ray can fly horizontally just about anywhere. Play, then, becomes an exercise in improvisation, mastering and strategically employing each character's skill set in a constantly changing situation. Combined with the increased difficulty of the new stages, Encore Made is less about speed than dexterity, less about excellence than survival. It's a more advanced Sonic for a more advanced player. I'm not that player, honestly, but the creativity on display is still exciting.
And as Caty McCarthy at US Gamer points out, it might be a promise: a suggestion of what this Sonic team, made up of ascended fans who deeply understand the franchise and its strengths, could do with a wholly original followup. Encore Mode suggests a deep insight into what makes Sonic Mania work, and though it's sometimes messy—punishingly hard at places, without effective tutorialization—it has the power to share some of that insight with the player. So far as I'm concerned, that's what a good remix does. It lets you see a thing you love that much better. By that metric, Sonic Mania Plus is a huge success.
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