This past spring was the first time I felt old. I’d mentioned a cold case to my little brother, Tommy Two-Shoes, something about a Lombax and his robot pal, and he’d looked up at me with that vacant expression and asked me what the hell I was yapping about. These kids, disillusioned by a history they never bothered to learn.
I’d gone straight a few years back, only taking the best cases; cold turkey on the live-service and I’d never felt better. But what did I know? Things were slipping on the right side of the tracks, too, and ain’t nothing I could do about it. Maybe it was the rotten games I’d played lately; endless streams of fetch questing and photorealistic slop. Maybe it was me, some single player bozo trying to make a living in this godforsaken city. Whatever the reason, I wanted out.
How much longer did I have? Was I over the hill? Or did I have one last case in me? One thing I knew for sure…something had to change. I bought a one-way ticket to Mouseburg. Maybe I’d find my answer there…
Style and Substance
Beginning life as an early in-house tech demo at Polish developer Fumi Games, Mouse: P.I. For Hire garnered viral attention for a singular visual approach imitating the rhythmic plasticity of rubberhose animation, best known for its use in Steamboat Willie cartoons. Mouse throws together a bunch of disparate elements from the so-called roaring 20s to create a world that feels heightened yet narratively feasible.
Private Eye Jack Pepper, enthusiastically voiced by Troy Baker, explores a web of corruption in the city of Mouseburg that implicates Hollywood starlets, mayoral candidates, and shady scientists alike. Though at first a lone missing persons case, the investigation takes Jack all over the city from opera houses to film sets to New Orleans bayous and underground laboratories; all wrapped in a detective-noir pastiche that puns its way through ethnic tensions and prohibition politics with references to violence against the ‘shrew’ community and drug-running “cheeseleggers.” Clearly, despite its narrative trappings, Mouse is not a real noir mystery but that hardly matters when I’m machine-gunning paint thinner into anthropomorphic mice. The game plays its noir stylings (with the requisite monologuing and East Coast slang) for laughs, and it works a treat. The aforementioned rubberhose style layers hand-drawn 2D animation over 3D environments to stunning effect. Health and ammo pickups dance excitedly in place, gangsters pirouette in hails of dying gunfire, and weapons bend and stretch through creative reload animations. From start to finish, Mouse: P.I. For Hire is a feast for the eyes.
It’s a good thing that Mouse makes such a fantastic first impression on the visual front because the game itself starts far too slowly. Kicking things off with your bare knuckles and a basic handgun, Fumi mete out new skills and weapons at a snail’s pace, adding just a shotgun and Tommy Gun (wittily rechristened the “James Gun” in a nod to the filmmaker of the same name) in the first few hours. The linear mission-to-mission structure is largely humdrum, ferrying Pepper back and forth between levels and his Mouseburg office; where you’ll catch up with allies, trick out your weaponry, and pin new clues to the “crime wall.” However, in spite of its title, the game features little to no actual detective work. Clues are relegated to collectible status while the case board acts as a mere narrative device; leads are resolved into the next objective with a single button press. Once the joys of its visual splendour wore off, I found myself yearning for something to shake up Mouse’s early formula.
Running and Gunning
The visuals may be one of a kind, but Mouse clearly owes its fisticuffs to so-called “boomer-shooters” like Doom, Quake, and Duke Nukem 3D. Locking the player in a large arena with various environmental hazards, platforming options, and wave after wave of enemies have all been tenets of this particular sub-genre for decades, and Mouse echoes those classics with style. Though it may sound like nitpicking, I found the marking of enemy spawn points (with tiny skull symbols above specific doors) took much of the tension out of combat encounters, allowing for entire groups of mice to be dispatched with a well-placed stick of dynamite. A seemingly small design choice that makes an outsized impact.
Cartoonish design ensures weapon feedback doesn’t hit as hard as your standard military shooter, but all the aforementioned visual flair makes up for it. An amusingly broad swathe of wacky weaponry unlocks at a steady rate, with only a few duds in the bunch. Old faithfuls like Jack’s handgun (Micer), shotgun (Boomstick), and dynamite (D-Namite) play their traditional roles well; whilst the Hellrazor (a bone-launching chainsaw) and Devarnisher (a turpentine-loaded SMG) stand out amongst the crowd.
Unfortunately, others, namely grenade launcher Loose Cannon and fiery double-barrel Kiss Kiss, are clear repeats of earlier weapons. They’re not all winners, then, but enemies perish in such creative ways that you’ll undoubtedly switch out your trusted favourites for new additions from time to time; a number of which are designed to stun or freeze enemies and set them up for high damage attacks. There’s balancing issues galore between those two weapon categories, but they nonetheless allow for interesting combinations that rewarded my creativity without requiring it.
Swings and Roundabouts
Thankfully, Mouse does progress in the second act, often setting two or three objectives at once across its world. The impact of this progression is twofold: first, the admittedly barebones roadhouses (one-stop shops for upgrades and ammo) actually get some use as you plan routes across the elegant isometric overworld and, second, pinning several missions’ worth of clues to the crime wall is markedly more satisfying, at least on a narrative level.
Upgrading my weapons also became more worthwhile as I would consistently return to whiz kid Tammy’s workshop with enough blueprints to fill at least one or two upgrades slots; or perhaps unlock a weapon’s alt-fire mode. However, the upgrade system itself felt particularly modest, and backwards, considering those precious alt-fire modes (like the Boomstick’s charged shot or the Devarnisher’s turpentine mine) are the first to unlock for the cost of one solitary blueprint.
The ammo economy is similarly broken. Jack will pick up generous amounts of ammunition from fallen enemies, supply crates, and in secret areas; you can also purchase ammo between missions at shops and roadhouses. As a result, neither was I short on ammo to the point where I played differently nor did I make any difficult choices in where to spend my resources. Throughout all of this, I would have preferred to purchase a grenade launcher or attach a second shotgun barrel myself instead of dealing with Jack’s increasingly unwieldy arsenal. It’s all the more frustrating because I can see the pieces of a genuinely dynamic, weighty upgrade system amidst all the repeated weapons and unused ammo.
The design of the levels themselves developed as well, putting more emphasis on exploration and platforming, finally utilising the full suite of traversal skills Jack acquires throughout the adventure to reach hidden areas. While the journeys to these areas were a blast, the rewards (such as handfuls of coins or some ammo) left something to be desired. Even the ostensibly higher valuable collectibles like blueprints or baseball cards had very little impact on gameplay. Had I not been reviewing the game, I’m not sure I would’ve gone out of my way to track down these secret areas. Unfortunately, the final mission and accompanying boss suffered from serious technical issues in my playthrough; a three-stage boss fight that became so flooded with enemies and effects that the framerate dipped substantially. It left a sour taste as the credits rolled that fortunately dissipated as I recalled the previous 20 hours of fun.
Mouse: P.I. For Hire takes its sweet time to get moving but stick with it and you’ll uncover an imaginative, visually-striking throwback shooter. An easy sell at such a reasonable price.
Mouse: P.I. For Hire is out now on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, PC, and Nintendo Switch 2.
