Mouse PI is what happens when your game has an artistic vision and nothing else. If the visuals alone are enough to sell you on getting this, you should. If you’re looking for a detective game, a well-written story, or a satisfying movement shooter… there are plenty of good options, but this isn’t one of them.
You play Jack Pepper, a private investigator in a 1930s cartoon world of Mice and Cheese. An immediate standout is that cheese references are everywhere, but jokes is too kind a word because often it’s just replacing a noun with cheese (like cheeseleggers instead of bootleggers). Cheese is everything: Cigars, drugs, paint, liquor, food, gasoline… everything, which can make it sometimes difficult to understand what is happening in the story.
For example, one clue is a tanker truck of blue cheese tipped over in Hollywood which is meaningless, since the story doesn’t establish blue cheese is supposed to be cocaine until many hours later (and even if it did, neither substance is liquid). Moreover, that clue doesn’t lead anywhere, which is a bigger issue with the investigating aspect of Mouse PI.
What is the mystery exactly? You start by looking for a missing magician, then into trafficking, a missing actress, corrupt police, cultists, robots, and fascists. At the end, any single conclusion gets like one throwaway line and none of it matters. Characters are introduced, offer nothing, and die in the same scene. For a game called Mouse PI that’s bathed in film noir tropes, I was really disappointed to see that there’s essentially no mystery you can follow (things just happen or are dropped; the three main cases don’t really tie together).
There is a lockpicking minigame and exploration for clues as a break from the combat. There are also dialogue options early on, but they disappear by the 4th mission, and the same is true of little environmental touches like the slot machines being interactive. Mouse PI sheds detail in every level until finally it stands naked as an excuse to shoot different people in unique locations. Bam.
Well hey, you can’t win them all. If the story doesn’t hold up, the combat should be pretty good, yeah? It’s a boomer shooter taking movement notes (more like SparkNotes) from DOOM Eternal. You always have a dash for avoiding projectiles, then quickly unlock a double jump and a very situational hover. Around the ¾ point, you get a wall run that can only be done on marked surfaces (which are extremely rare), and at the tail end, you get a climb for marked surfaces (which is used maybe 4 times).
Mobility is a strange choice because the level design/art design slam you into invisible walls if you use your jump/hover to any advantage, plus height and abilities breaks the AI pathfinding. Trying to be a movement shooter with infrequent, situational environment-based skills (with one of them unlocking in the final stretch and being unusable in the final level) was a significant mistake and reinforces that the biggest thing MOUSE PI was missing was a dedicated game designer on staff.
Of note is that I once said SPRAWL had the worst weapon loadout I’ve seen in an FPS game, but Mouse PI takes the (cheese)cake on that one (BTW, that’s how you do a cheese pun). The only good weapons are the Tommy gun and a gun that shoots the DIP from Roger Rabbit. The first is an extremely powerful, high-capacity SMG. The second is essentially a semi-auto rifle that applies a stun-lock DoT that kills almost every enemy with a single hit.
Everything else? Things that don’t work as well, use a bunch of ammo per enemy, and 2 slow stun guns that require you to switch weapons to actually kill anyone. Finally, there’s an unlockable alien ray gun that, impressively, doesn’t work at all. Most of the weapons are so poorly balanced that their tutorial demonstrates why you shouldn’t use them.
There’s also some power-ups, and… they’re all bad. 3 times you get a can of spinach that gives you Popeye arms and forces you into melee combat, 3 times drink tea and get a cuphead finger gun, and sometimes there’s a pepper that causes you to set enemies on fire when you shoot them or they touch you. The fundamental issue is that two of these power-ups are significantly worse than your regular loadout.
For the Popeye arms, all they had to do was use the Berserk powerup from DOOM 2016 as a reference for killing enemies in one hit. Instead, every enemy takes 4-7 punches but anything above 1 hit makes them worse than your guns. It’s a major misstep.
Enemy variation is weak. This is no DOOM Eternal, or even DOOM 1993. Enemies are reskinned variations on melee rushers or guys with guns. The most interesting enemy is a sniper who teleports after every shot. The problem is that while there are about 10 different enemies, but most die in 1 hit (even on hard) and neither arena rosters or level design makes you feel the difference. Likewise, there’s a guy who shoots *one* bouncing electric ball who shows up without introduction in the final stretch, and there are only like 3 of him. It’s bad design. That said, the boss fights almost always have a gimmick and are a standout highlight of the overall experience.
But again, a significant issue, even with the bosses, is that it feels like there was no game designer. One of the boss fights has you looking up at an enemy rapidly throwing bombs down on you that destroy the floor where they hit. If you walk over one of these spots, it’s instant death. Guess what you can’t see if you’re looking *up* at the boss.And yes, you can jump up to him… which defeats the entire gimmick.
This same issue of missing design and play fundamentals is doubly true in the minigame, Baseball Cards, which is a microcosm of bad decisions and illustrative of bigger issues with the game. Baseball Cards is a Gwent-like that is expensive to play, badly explains its rules, and has no strategy behind it other than “use card with biggest number” it’s a bad minigame and (like the pathfinding problem above) it’s doubly frustrating that the AI opponent is so bad it often can’t get a single score and you have to play it so many times to get a reward gun that does not work.
Besides bosses, there is one standout interesting thing Mouse PI does. Throughout missions, you collect clues for your investigation and pin them on a conspiracy board. There are also optional clues to collect, and getting those does two things: It unlocks some levels early (like Cuphead you can choose your stage from a larger map) AND if you collect enough clues, it unlocks additional levels to “resolve” some of the other mysteries. Unfortunately, doing levels out of sequence adds nothing. If you do the circus early and get the wall-running ability, it won’t be helpful on other levels, since they weren’t designed with marked wall-running surfaces.
At the end of the day, Mouse PI is a poorly designed game with a fun Max Fleischer art style that if I’m being honest, is unique but could have done more. It tries to imitate Cuphead but misses the mark. The gunplay loses its catharsis, the levels feel overly long (about 40 min each), the story directionless, and the jokes aren’t jokes; they’re concepts. A sawed-in-half woman hanging out in her home and being oblivious to being cut in half isn’t a joke
I think one of the clearest explanations of why and how MOUSE PI misses the mark is that your starter pistol is a Mauser, so the obvious pun would be to call it a MOUSER. So instead they call it a MICER because (as I’ve seen fans explain) the joke is that you expected it to be called a mouser, so calling it a MICER is the joke. But if part of your audience feels you missed the obvious joke and others feel the need to explain the joke, it’s not funny, and that’s MOUSE PI’s whole issue end to end.
