Mouse: P.I. for Hire nails the 1930s noir aesthetic but has gameplay that, while very fun, doesn’t quite live up to the strong thematic vibes set up by the music and art style.
The artwork, music, and animation of Mouse: P.I. are top-notch and make the game scream 1930s LA noir. Every bit of the artistic direction of the game helps set this theme up, and it carries strongly throughout, even as the plot takes some turns away from typical noir fare toward the end.
I was expecting the choice of using black and white to be something that was simply contributing to the theme, but the way that Fumi Games have lit the environment means that in motion it’s actually quite beautiful to look at as well. All the characters and NPCs in the game are billboards, which provides a unique aesthetic against the fully 3D backgrounds.
There is also a wide variety of environments, with an impressive number of different themes for a game built by such a small team. One level will be set on a Tinseltown movie studio, and the next on a Cajun bayou for instance. Each level was very well-designed, typically with twisting paths that keep the level from feeling too linear. At the same time, levels that require some amount of backtracking often open up shortcuts to avoid becoming tedious. A great quality of life feature is the ability to summon a detective brush at any time, which will find a set of footprints for you to follow toward your objective should you get lost.
There are also a lot of really fun small details in this game. Progression-blocking doors will be labeled “Exit Only” or “No Entry (yet)”. When you attend a fancy party, Jack swaps his gun out for a glass of champagne, held humorously high. Even the chirps from NPCs as you defeat them are amusing: “fuggeht about it” or “mamma mia!”. And, of course, being a mouse-themed game, Mouse: P.I. for Hire is riddled with cheese puns. Blue Cheese as a stand-in for drugs. Cheeseleggers as the smugglers. Jack Pepper and Cornelius Stilton as characters, etc.
Since the detective noir atmosphere is so strongly built and maintained by the artistic choices that the game makes, I was somewhat let down by the detective aspects of the gameplay. You take Jack Pepper out on missions, where one type of collectible he might find is a clue. Then, back at Jack’s office, you just press a button to put those clues on a cork board. Once you have enough of them, Jack makes a connection and unlocks the next set of levels. The system is thematically fine, but I wish there was more depth to it, such as how you were able to connect clues yourself in the Mind Place in Alan Wake 2.
What the gameplay excels at, however, is being a super fun first-person shooter. Movement is quick and fun, and kept fresh by adding more abilities as the game goes on. The guns are varied and fun to play with, although I do wish there were better tutorial mechanics for some of the more esoteric ones to teach you what they do. Technically, there are many different enemy types, but they mostly just boil down to a small handful of different enemies with varying skins, so the enemy variety is a bit lacking. However, each boss fight had unique and fun mechanics. Combat arenas are telegraphed, so you’re not going to be surprised by many fights, but they are also varied and fun to play in. You’ll have fights in open areas, in city streets, on a submarine, or on a spinning roulette wheel, each of which plays differently and lets you utilize your weapons and movement in different ways, preventing the game from ever feeling too repetitive.
There were a few areas of gameplay that didn’t work for me though. When you take damage, your HUD gets covered with an ink splat for a bit. This fits great with the cartoon theming, but when I was playing on a smaller screen the ink splat really hindered my ability to figure out where enemies were in some of the larger fights - a problem which only compounds itself because an inability to find the enemies means more likelihood of taking damage, which means more ink splats.
Safes in Mouse: P.I. for Hire are opened with a tail-picking mini-game. The mini-game is not difficult, but some safes come with clocks that are either ticking down time or ticking down your remaining moves (or both). The game never explains this to you, but if that timer hits zero, or if you happen to cancel out of the mini-game, that safe will be permanently locked out. There is no way to go back and try again. While neither of the timers is particularly restrictive, the audio for them makes it seem like you have less time than you actually do, which caused me to rush once or twice and trigger a lockout.
The baseball mini-game is a great concept that could also use refining. Baseball cards are one of the collectibles in Mouse: P.I. for Hire, and rather than just being something to collect, you use them to play a baseball card game in the bar outside your office. The game is fairly straightforward, with not a ton of strategy, but it’s fun enough. My biggest problem, though, is that the cards you find as collectibles aren’t always going to have better stats than the cards you already have. And that, in turn, means your deck is getting weaker the more cards you find. After you collect enough cards, you are eventually allowed to ban some of them from showing up in the mini-game, but that caps out at only three cards banned, so I still was often drawing cards that were weaker than I wanted. A minor nit, but it would also have been nice if the game remembered which cards I banned last time, so I didn’t have to go select the same three every time I started a new round.
It does seem as though Fumi Games are listening to the feedback that Mouse: P.I. for Hire is getting and actively addressing it. When I started playing, there was no way to go back to any prior level in order to hunt for collectibles or finish side quests. By the time I finished, that feature had been patched in. Similarly, widescreen support wasn’t available initially and has since been added, although it still has some work to do as some of the animations were clearly drawn for 16:9 and get amusingly cut off in widescreen.
My own game time was fairly long because I spent a good chunk of time collectible hunting before the patch arrived that let you replay levels. Even so, while never getting boring or repetitive, Mouse: P.I. for Hire did wind up feeling like it was a bit longer than it needed to be by the end.
Mouse: P.I. for Hire provides a really fun first-person shooter experience, wrapped up in an incredibly well-done detective noir theme. While the story is a bit convoluted, and goes to some unexpected places near the end, the visuals, animation, and music will be the first things I think of when I think back on this game. I wish there was more to the detective side of the game than just the theme, but the first-person shooting was fun enough that I’m glad I played.
