Man, March 2020 sucked. I had been working overnight for years before my job unceremoniously rolled back operating hours, forcing me to move back to days and lose a 20% pay differential. I couldn't just leave and find a new job either, as the COVID-19 pandemic was already impacting the job market - hell, by this point it was a nightmare just finding non-perishable food items. I was tired, hungry, stressed, and broke.

But working days meant I could do something I hadn't done since I was a child: play video games while the sun comes up. This was something I used to do while waiting for infomercials to transition into the morning cartoon blocks as a kid, and it had long since represented a weird sort of ideal where the only thing I had to worry about was whether I'd turn the TV on and see a PSA about spousal abuse before I could get my Genesis started. Being able to do this again was therapeutic, it gave me something small to look forward to each morning when I otherwise wanted to shut down.

Castle of Illusion was the first game I played on this new schedule, and I think it was the absolute best place to start. It's incredibly simplistic as far as mascot platformers go, owed to the fact that it was designed for an audience whose skills were still soft, but that also makes it the perfect game wake up to when you're 32 and running on 3 hours of sleep. As far as early Sega Genesis games go, it also feels remarkably good to play. Other games like Altered Beast or Revenge of Shinobi had a certain off feeling in the way they controlled, but Castle of Illusion feels excellent. Mickey's weight feels natural, bouncing on enemies is satisfying, and levels are well designed and fun to explore. It also looks pretty damn good for that era, too. At the time, the level of detail and animation quality was a point of pride both for Disney and Sega, and it was used to market the Genesis heavily, especially towards a younger demo. Of course, Genesis games would look far better in the years following its release, but for the time that this came out, it was one of the better looking games on the system.

As far as the Illusion series goes, I've already professed my preference (and love) for World of Illusion, but Castle is still a very solid game that I think holds up better than many of the other early releases on the Genesis. There's a remake of this as well, and while I don't like it as much, it's also pretty good and well worth playing if you enjoy the original. That said, I wonder whether this game is engaging enough to entertain most people nowadays, and I think a lot of my appreciation for it is both due to playing it as a kid and having it become imprinted as a sort of "comfort game" as an adult, especially given the context I played it in.