Like any stupidly optimistic gamer, I sat in the darkness of my house, booting up a game that I prayed would shine bright enough to deliver on its promises. A black and white shooter set in a town full of mice? Classic cartoon animation style? A black gumshoe plot? The features stacked up like Jenga blocks, and one faulty element could bring down the entire tower. But isn’t that always the case in Gamer Town, where promising pitches multiply and few succeed in realizing their audacious dreams.
Mouse: PI For Hire, the long-awaited indie first-person shooter born from an article about X, finally releases Thursday after years of trailers and teasers, and at a modest $30 to boot. Although its creators at Polish studio Fumi Games insist that the game’s look is more broadly inspired by the 1930s “rubber hose” style of animation popularized by Betty Boop and Fleischer cartoons, it’s not hard to see visual similarities to Steamboat Willie, the black-and-white character that preceded Mickey Mouse. Much of Mouse: PI For Hire’s appeal is the vintage cartoon style contrasted with violent gunfire – and after playing half a dozen hours of the game, that’s a big part of its charm.
But it’s a pleasure to discover all the visual style superimposed on a fairly complex narrative peppered with classic noir elements. Players control Jack Pepper, a war hero turned hardened detective whose pursuit of a missing persons case takes him from the society lights of Mouseburg to its seedy alleys and dangerous criminal underbellies, uncovering a vast conspiracy.
Mouse: PI For Hire is full of noir staples like a detective protagonist, a femme fatale lover, political corruption, social inequality, dirty cops, and a bulletin board where our detective completes the case clue by clue. Despite the cartooniness and rubber hose violence, the noir is played straight; it’s clear that this is a love letter to the crime novel genre made famous by American fiction writers.
In a conversation with Fumi Games lead producer Maciej Krzemień last June at Summer Game Fest, the team working on the game took inspiration from the stories of famous black writer Raymond Chandler, and the narrative leads did a lot of historical research to fully understand the time period.
“Obviously, we’re not American ourselves. We wanted to get this whole style of dark detective novels right, but with some light elements,” Krzemień told me.
Much of the success of Pepper’s character belongs to his voice actor, Troy Baker, who delivers lines and exposition in gritty tones befitting a hard-boiled detective recounting the case throughout the game. The rest of the voice cast is thoroughly enjoyable – Florian Clare as reporter Wanda Fuller, Frank Todaro as politician, and Cornelius Stilton, Pepper’s war buddy, among others – giving a range of period-appropriate performances ranging from fake Mid-Atlantic sophistication to a streetwise accent coming from whatever New Jersey analogue they have near Mouseburg.
The dialogue is downright dark and the game’s writing is a mix of 1930s dark humor and groan-worthy puns (which is a good thing, I swear). Mice end the day with a long drag of stinky cheese to unwind, bootleggers are “cheeseleggers”, a gun inspired by the German Mauser pistol is called the Micer, and so on.
Although the game’s soundtrack is a fitting mix of big band tunes and jazz, Mouse: PI For Hire’s commitment to evoking the 1930s goes deeper. An optional layer of filters in the film grain and wispy blur of visuals, as well as degrading the audio quality of music to sound like it’s coming from vinyl or wax cylinders. Looking and sounding older is a fun addition to the immersion.
But Mouse: PI For Hire is first and foremost a shooter, and while its combat has more pros than cons, there are enough challenges to adapt its luscious animation style to 3D shooting to make it feel like a mixed bag.
Mouse: PI For Hire is more of a joyfully immersive escapade than a masterpiece shooter
Mouse: PI For Hire feels a lot like a modern take on the first wave of first-person shooters, like Doom and Duke Nukem: enemies enter a room the player is in, shoot from a distance, or close in for melee. Like some so-called “Boomer shooters” released in recent years that evoke old-school shooter vibes with updated controls, enemies don’t have much dynamic movement, leading players to trade gunfire and switch to the right weapon at the moment.
Players have a growing arsenal of BioShock-like weapons, relying on a pistol, shotgun, and Thompson submachine gun for the heavy lifting, as well as a delightfully new Devarnisher gun that fires balls of turpentine (the chemical that old-school animators used to wipe away ink) to melt enemies. There are more in later parts of the game, and upgrades to boot, that make weapons more useful throughout the game.
The Devarnisher melts enemies with turpentine.
Screenshot by David Lumb/CNETMouse: PI For Hire doesn’t try to be a cutting-edge shooter, so it’s generally okay to get into firefights with static enemies. The problem lies in combining the game’s visual style with the shooting action: enemies look straight out of a cartoon, but their beautifully animated 2D bodies can be difficult to hit in 3D space. Often when strafing, I have trouble hitting smaller enemies, and their hitbox can get a little confusing, causing me to miss some shots that I thought I should hit.
This isn’t too bad on easy and standard difficulties, which are quite forgiving, but when I switched it to hard mode (which you can do on the fly), the punishing damage made my unsteady aim more problematic. I stumbled here and there trying to keep my bullets on enemies, especially the ones further away.
While this is a bit confusing, it’s ultimately a minor inconvenience for a well-designed experience. Mouse: PI For Hire is a period ride, and as long as I treat rooms full of enemies and bosses as a flavor in a story, I’m far from disappointed. Not every shooter has to be the next genre-reinventing Portal or Titanfall 2, especially games priced at $30 that will likely last more than a dozen hours before hitting the credits.
What the game gets right is its dual commitment to its animation style and its complex world. I’ll never get tired of watching the rubber hose-style animations showing guns reloading or enemy heads being blown open with a close-range shotgun blast in a burst of comically visceral violence. It’s a charming counterpart to Mouseburg, a realistic but believable town with all the characters and locations, power struggles and twists and turns you’ll find in any other film noir.
Early in the game, I found a lead in an opera house where I foiled an assassination attempt on a politician – although this was done with an onstage cannon that started burning the place down, and I had to fight a burly singer mini-boss dressed as Brunhilda to get out. The blend of detective staples with cartoon logic makes Mouse: PI For Hire truly unique, and its Steamboat Willie look obscures that the game is deeper than it initially appears in its dedication to telling a detective story, with all the genre’s obscure twists and turns.
“Without spoiling anything, there’s a bigger conspiracy behind this, and it’s all quite serious in terms of the social issues, the social themes of the game, and it actually reflects the political climate of the world in the 1930s — and not just in America,” Krzemień told me last June.
So yeah, it’s a game where a non-Mickey Mouse gets a gun, but all in an effort to uncover a mystery, fight a growing fascist threat, and hopefully get enough cheddar to pay off his debts.
Mouse: PI For Hire releases April 16 for PC, Xbox One X/S, PS5 and Nintendo Switch 2.
