Mouse: PI for Hire review

I’m surprised to tell you that Mouse: PI For Hire is the best shooter I’ve played in ages.

Not because I’m especially down on rubberhose animation, or rodents, or monochrome Unity engine environments, but because I hugely underestimated how well those disparate elements could be combined. This is a luxurious, maximalist game that commits equally hard to making you feel like a detective solving a case as it does making you feel like a gun-toting hero. It doesn’t depend on those striking visuals to hold your attention, but holds it instead with good old-fashioned craftsmanship. And Troy Baker’s voice.

It’s pre-war America, or a version of it where rodents have supplanted humans. Society’s recovering from the Great War, and down in Mouseburg, political tensions are pulled tight as a snare drum. Xenophobic sentiment about shrews is on the rise. Gangsters masquerading as police officers are roaming the streets, and starlets are mysteriously disappearing in Tinsel Ave. It’s down to the eponymous PI Jack Pepper (Baker) to get to the bottom of it all, using a novel combination of hardboiled detective work and fantastically violent gunfights.

Aficionados of detective noir featuring social commentary via anthropomorphised animals will note that this isn’t the first game with such a premise, with Tails Noir (previously known as Backbone) having trodden the same ground in 2021. The social satire isn’t especially fresh, truth be told. I’ve played too many games about racism abstracted via aliens or animals—or the moral perils of 20th century capitalism—for this one to tread new ground. But where this game does feel fresh is in its loving eye for Old Hollywood.

More than the obvious inequalities of the era, what Mouse: PI For Hire really captures well are the cultural fascinations of 1930s-1940s America. A time when Hollywood stars were living gods, when baseball and science fiction occupied the collective consciousness alongside newspaper headlines about corrupt officials and mob activity. When the sight of a cartoon mouse was captivating.

The art style sets this ball rolling. As far as I’ve seen, the blend of 3D Unity environments and 2D hand-drawn weapon and character sprites is unique, and I find it constantly thrilling to observe the little details in everything from weapon reloading to (surprisingly detailed and horrifying) death animations. Cuphead is still the GOAT in this specific niche, but Fumi Games has definitely entered the chat.

What’s more impressive than the visual effect itself is how readable the game remains. Combat is a multi-faceted and fast-paced affair, so it speaks to the devs’ design chops that I'm able to discern multiple enemy types, environmental hazards, ammo/health pickups and collectibles at a glance in each scene. Pathfinding doesn’t suffer for the black and white presentation, either. Where level designers usually use conspicuous coloured lights to guide your eye, here it’s the use of space and a logical floorplan that keeps you motoring forwards.

And, indeed, backwards: there’s a metroidvania aspect to progress which sees you revisiting levels tooled up with new traversal abilities, often in a different state than you left them. When I returned to an old opera house I trashed a few missions back, I found it mid-renovation. That kind of detail kept me nodding approvingly throughout the campaign.

Between missions Jack returns to the hub area, Dishonored-style, to catch up with buddies at his office or the dive bar across the street. These interstitials became a highlight, allowing me a bit of downtime to feel like a detective as I discussed the latest development in a case with Wanda the freelance journalist, pinned clues to the board in my office, or—and this became an obsession—played a baseball card game in the bar. It’s a simple high-card-wins game and Gwent can sleep easy at night, but it still hooked me hard enough to drive around every roadhouse on the world map looking for high-power pitchers and batters to buy.

The fundamentals of combat feel tight. Mouse is paced like a boomer shooter, but that zippy speed is married to a bunch of alt-fire options, environmental attacks and movement controls that make you feel like you can dance around the busier arenas, picking off enemies with a satisfying variety of methods.

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Boss fights should be the ultimate test of your ability to combine all these attack and traversal options. But unlike fellow rubberhose animation enthusiast Cuphead, this game isn’t about throwing constant skill check bosses at you. They function more to break up the rhythm of fights, providing a straightforward but welcome moment of duelling and light pattern recognition.

Not every combat mission is a home run. Early forays set a high bar by introducing intriguing, tactically rich elements like the giant rotating roulette wheel in the casino tutorial, a secret secret lab beneath a secret lab, or a Tinseltown movie set where pratfall traps are waiting for you to activate them to take out a handful of hostile mammals at once. Happily these kind of levels are the majority, but among them are abandoned subway stations and urban areas that feel slightly more stock.

You might expect a game that goes all-in on its noir visual aesthetic to make a strong point of its story. I certainly wouldn’t call it a weakness, but rather a victory of premise over plot. The social commentary running through each case feels reheated and the dialogue’s lacking that Raymond Chandler wit, but the slimy politicians, jaded film stars and bizarro cultists of Mouseburg are sharply drawn in every sense. In the end it’s the gunplay, the detective downtime and the world-building that elevate this choice cut of detective noir, not the whodunnit aspect, and I’m absolutely fine with that.