REVIEW – As an old-school style video game paying tribute to the golden age of animation, “MOUSE: P.I. For Hire” succeeds

Animation is quite possibly the most laborious art form on the planet, and hand-drawn animation even more so. You have to have a real dedication to your craft in order to draw hundreds upon hundreds of images of the same character in the hopes that they’ll move. It’s the reason titles like Cuphead took so long to develop; it took over seven years to produce that game, and an enormous chunk of it was spent on the individual animation cells needed to make the magic happen.

Animation is quite possibly the most laborious art form on the planet, and hand-drawn animation even more so. You have to have a real dedication to your craft in order to draw hundreds upon hundreds of images of the same character in the hopes that they’ll move. It’s the reason titles like Cuphead took so long to develop; it took over seven years to produce that game, and an enormous chunk of it was spent on the individual animation cells needed to make the magic happen.

It’s even more difficult when you attempt to take that aesthetic and move it into three dimensions. Other titles have attempted that to a degree (Epic Mickey, Kingdom Hearts) but never really pull it off.

MOUSE: P.I. For Hire pulled it off, and the years it spent in development shows that passion and good planning can absolutely work miracles.

What Is It?

MOUSE: P.I. For Hire is a first-person shooter that is heavily inspired by both classic film noir and the rubberhose-style of animation from the 1930s (think classic Disney or Fleischer Studios). Created by Polish newcomers Fumi Games, it originated as a tech demo in 2022 before becoming the full-fledged title we have here.

As you can expect, this is a game loaded with punny humor to go along with its cartoony sensibilities, but surprisingly enough, it has a good deal of world-building behind it. You play as Jack Pepper, a private investigator and former cop in the city of Mouseburg who’s just trying to pay his bills while dealing with the seedy underbelly of his home turf. Assisting him are an investigative reporter named Wanda Fuller, a spunky mechanic named Tammy Tumbler, an old war buddy and career politician named Cornelius Stilton, and the barkeep of his local watering hole (well, ‘cheese hole’) named John Brown.

The game begins in media res on a zeppelin hovering over Mouseburg, but the actual story starts small: a magician (and, as it turns out, widower) goes missing during one of his shows, leaving his replacement assistant behind. While trying to discover the wand-wielder’s whereabouts, Jack begins to find crumbs of a much bigger plot underneath: for one, there’s the weird hooded cultists hanging around the magician’s house, as well as a bunch of crooked cops who may or may not be involved in a kidnapping plot, and on top of all that, there’s a new political group called the Big Mouse Party that is slowly gaining power and determined to solve ‘the Shrew Problem.’

It’s not exactly subtle, but it makes for some really engaging plot. It’s also a lot more violent than your classic cartoon would have been, but it’s got the bouncy jazz soundtrack to back it up.

Why Should I Care?

At its core, MOUSE is an FPS inspired by the classics and plays like it. In fact, much of its basic gameplay is inspired by Doom; You have an assortment of weapons, restore your health through medkits rather than through regeneration, grab pieces of armor to give you additional hit points, and power-ups that temporarily make you super strong. But we’re in a cartoon world, so obviously everything has a cartoon twist: besides your standard pistols and shotguns, you also have a mobile cannon ball launcher and a squirt gun that shoots ‘dip’ (you know, like from Roger Rabbit). Instead of first aid boxes, you restore health by either eating cheese or drinking bottles of health potion. Instead of helmets and armor, you get iron bowler hats and bulletproof vests. And as for those power-ups, you get everything from a cup of coffee that lets you shoot bullets from your fingers, and a can of spinach that does exactly what you think it does. All of the weapons you have can also be upgraded thanks to the previously mentioned Tammy’s shop.

That’s where the similarities end. Because on top of these standard FPS features, the game also adds on a few features of its own. Jack’s mouse tail is essentially a multi-tool that he learns to use for numerous tasks. The primary one is lock-picking: there are safes and doors with padlocks that require Jack to stick his tail into the mechanisms to release them, which involve slowly maneuvering it through tight spaces and the occasional spikes in order to move the tumblers to unlock them. Another major one you learn is hovering, where Jack uses his tail as a rotor in order to hover in the air or ride air currents. The last one involves using his tail as a grappling hook to swing over pits or reach high places.

But although the game is primarily an FPS, it’s not just that. At the end of the day, Jack is a P.I., so he does P.I. things. He speaks with his friends and informants, he gathers evidence and pieces it together on his ‘crime board’ at his office, he follows leads that help him wrap up cases or find further clues, and he even rides around in his automobile to get from one place to another (in a rather lovely looking overworld). This being a Noir story, he’ll ride out to everything from sewers, to abandoned buildings and crumbling mansions, to the local movie studios and the Wetlands (think the Louisiana Bayou). He’ll go up against everyone from gangsters, to crooked cops, ‘cheese-leggers’, and BMP stormtroopers (again, it’s not subtle). There’s also more fantastical enemies like robots and ghosts, but that would be getting into spoiler territory.

Of course, even the best shooters require a bit of downtime. In this case, MOUSE has a number of collectibles: newspapers that fill out the world-building, comic strips that tell a different but related story, and baseball cards (which in turn can be used for an in-game card game).

What Makes It Worthy My Time And Money?

Honestly, any issues the player may have are more on preferences than anything else. The game’s shooter gameplay is about as old-school as it comes, meaning that there’s no health regeneration nor any weapons mapped to specific buttons (both firearms and throwables all stick to the same weapon wheel). The difficulty can also ramp up quite a bit even on normal difficulty (because just like Doom, this game has three difficulty settings).

As for me personally, I had only two real problems with the game. The first has to do with the graphics: yes, they’re gorgeous in and of themselves, but there are some re-used character models that I frequently found. Those models, by the way, are strictly two dimensional. The world around you is in three dimensions, but characters are all static and flat as a board…which, considering the rubberhose aesthetic, is to be expected.

The other issue has to do with the detective side of the game: it’s mostly window dressing. Unlike something like Shadows of Doubt or even Alan Wake II, where one has to use the evidence and ‘crime board’ to piece together leads on one’s own, in MOUSE it’s pretty much entirely linear. No real thought needed. It’s not bad window dressing, mind you, but it’s still kind of shallow.

But if you can’t tell: yes, I’m definitely recommending this game. I love noir, I love the golden age of animation, I love old shooters, and I love games that can surprise me with their depth. This one has all three. A lot of love went into this title, and you should savor every bit of it.

You know, like a good cheese.