In my memory, Rayman Legends is a timeless classic. Released in 2013, it arrived at a moment when Ubisoft were becoming best known for po-faced games like Assassin’s Creed and innumerable Tom Clancy spinoffs, yet Rayman Legends was a gorgeous 2D platformer brimming over with silliness and slapstick that showed off the publisher’s creative talents and uniquely French humour.

So the news that Ubisoft is remaking it as Rayman Legends Retold, dropping its 2D art for 3D animation was not well received in the Benson household, I can tell you.

Granted, when I learned Rayman Legends Retold is a collaboration between original developers Ubisoft Montpellier, who have since gone on to make Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, and Ubisoft Milan, the team behind the excellent Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle series, I calmed down a little. And, then I played it and realised they might just know what they’re doing.

With Rayman Legends Retold, Ubisoft are leaving the level design largely alone. In fact, the old UbiArt Framework engine has been made to work within Ubisoft’s more modern Snowdrop engine, so the original levels have been imported directly. While all the assets are new, the layout is much the same. Instead, what they are adding is focused on the interstitial moments between levels.

While I remembered the beautiful 2D artwork of Rayman Legends’ levels – crumbling castles, richly green swamps, and golden Day of the Dead-themed deserts – I’d forgotten how these levels were stitched together. Each world was presented as a corridor in a bare gallery with the entrance to levels existing as picture frames you could hop into. Despite arriving on the scene more than 15 years after Super Mario 64 and using the same conceit of jumping into canvases to load a level, its hub world was far less coherent than Princess Peach’s Castle. So Ubisoft are pouring life into the seams between levels until they’re fit to burst.

“It’s a bit all over the place,” production director Alessandro Arndt Mucchi says, describing Rayman Legends’ story and layout. “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.” Ostensibly, the story of Rayman Legends is that an evil magician has been stirring the nightmares of Polokus, the Bubble Dreamer. The god’s nighttime musings form the lands of the Glade of Dreams, so nightmares mean chaos across its realms. Rayman and his friends are woken up to defeat the magician and set things right. Though, this is only briefly told to you in an opening cinematic and is rarely touched on afterwards.

Ubisoft are fixing this in several ways. The most overt is new fully-voiced cinematics that look a little like Ubisoft’s pitch to give Rayman the Super Mario Bros. Movie treatment, but as lovely as those are, it’s the subtler touches that have won me over.

(I am stretching the definition of ‘subtle’ here because I am about to talk at length about a toad having a shower.)

In the original Rayman Legends, the second world, Toad Story, is a set of swamp levels filled with beanstalks and aggressive amphibians. The levels are a glorious mix of ground-based platforming, where you leap and wall jump the bamboo structures of the toads’ camps, swim under them in the swamp waters, and soar above them, carried by gusts of hot air. The boss of this world, an armoured toad, appears on the eighth of its nine levels. Summoned by the evil magician, you watch as boots and gloves launch themselves onto giant amphibian feet and hands, an introduction that lasts all of six seconds. You then battle the armoured toad, dodging its missiles as it flies about in rocket boots and hides behind a bubble shield. It works, but it works much better in Rayman Legends Retold.

Rather than an episode in a story set in a bare gallery, the second world is now a place: Stinkbog. Set within the swamp, the entrances to levels are portals that you must reach by walljumping between trees, flying up gusts of wind, and running up winding cords of ivy. Stand before a level portal and you hear whispers of its music coming through the air. The hub is full of life. In the foreground there are crows fluffing their feathers and in the background you can see signs of the toad camps, bamboo staircases corkscrewing up vast vines that grow like redwoods. It’s both a tease of the levels you will be entering and an environment to be explored in and of itself.

The best of touches, though, is there right when you arrive in Stingbog: in the middle distance is a toad up to its waist in swamp mud sniffing his pits. One armpit, then the other, and then back to the first. This is a toad that just wants to get clean. You leave him behind when you move the screen off to the right and start jumping into the world’s levels. But later, when you launch into one of Rayman Legends Retold new level types, the dragon ride, you see him again.

Looking like the Starfox games seen through the lens of How To Train Your Dragon, these new levels have you hop onto the back of a scaly, firebreathing mount and guide it through a rollercoaster of hazards. You need to thread a needle between obstacles and enemy fire, barrel rolling left and right to dodge anything that blocks your path or blasting a hole through barriers with fireballs. “Instead of just moving from one hub to the next through a menu or a painting, we wanted to give the feeling that you’re actually discovering these places,” animation director Marco Renso says. “That’s the fantasy of these levels. You’re flying through the Glade of Dreams, so you’re seeing these realms from another angle.”

Renso explains these sections are an opportunity to give more “space” to the bosses, saying “this was an opportunity to make them feel a little bit more present.” In the Stinkbog’s dragon ride, for example, you see off to the side of the level’s action the giant toad from before is finally getting a bath. Smaller toads scrub away at his pits with mops, and you can see from his face that he’s blissfully happy. It’s just another great day in the swamp. And then you come blasting through the toad camp, torching vines, and shattering barricades.

The toad is easy to miss if your attention is focused on the path in front, but he gets to his feet in a panic and starts to sprint off screen, only a narrow loincloth covering his hefty green bum. A little later, on the path ahead of you is a towel rack and set of armour. The toad reemerges from the side of the screen, heaves himself up onto the path, and starts to pull on a great armoured rocket boot. You have to dodge to the side to get around him before he flies off screen again, a dropped towel floating to the ground in his wake. He next appears flying backwards across the screen, hitching up his armoured britches. “Marco presented various creative briefs of these moments to the whole team – the dragon rides, the new musical levels – and I cannot count the times I was with tears in my eyes, crying from laughing,” Arndt Mucchi says. “It was so fun to discover these things about the world we were working on.”

As you continue on your route, causing havoc in the toad camp, toads parachute down to try and block your path while others fire up colourful fireworks to blind your way. The toad leader, now fully armoured, returns, ready to defend his kingdom. He tries to grab you out of the air, forcing you to dive your dragon down into a hollow bamboo cane. Moments later, his armoured fists start punching through the walls and you have to dodge around them.

Out of the tube, the action switches to a side on view. You’re flying though between bits of floating castle, toads drift downwards on parachutes shooting at you with bazookas, and in the background the armoured toad flings bits of masonry toward you. Everywhere you look there is life and activity.

Duck and dive between all these attacks and the armoured toad is eventually struck by lightning and he plunges out of view. Though, your victory is short lived, a second lightning bolt stuns your dragon and the camera switches view again, chasing you downwards as you guide your unconscious mount between obstacles. Moments before crashing into the ground it recovers and you emerge on the other side of the battle into a desert land, the next hub.

I’m a huge fan of the original Rayman Legends, but I have to admit this is a much better way of tying its worlds together. Where before the armoured toad was a fun boss battle, it’s now one that frames you as a clumsy invader ruining the toad kingdom’s otherwise blissful day. Rayman’s creators have always delighted in slapstick and silliness, and Rayman Legends Retold looks to have found a rich new vein just beneath the surface of a game that was already exceptionally good fun.

A remake is never automatically good or automatically bad, some feel like little more than grabs at nostalgia, while others recreate and alter a classic so deftly you forget to question what was part of the original and what has been added. From the few hours I’ve played of Rayman Legends Retold, it appears to be the latter. I recoiled at the email telling me Ubisoft are remaking Rayman Legends, so that I found myself so excited to play the full game speaks to how much I enjoyed what I saw.

Oh, and they’re adding new music levels. So that has swung the needle even further into the pro region.