Mouse: P.I. For Hire Review – Review

We didn’t all grow up with them, but black and white cartoons like Betty Boop and Mickey Mouse’s Steamboat Willie never cease to tickle the nostalgia strings for a time long past. The runaway success of Cuphead can be partly, if not primarily, attributed to its retro cartoon aesthetic, and so games coming after with a similar art style were going to draw their fair share of comically large blinking eyes. Mouse: P.I. for Hire arrived with a bang, fired from its hardboiled protagonist’s pistol, but it’s all boomer shooter in terms of the minute-to-minute gameplay. While the visuals and voices continually captivate, the narrative loop of driving to a new area and then returning to the office turns to stale cheese after half a dozen hours.

As private detective Jack Pepper, you work towards solving a growing web of capers spreading across the city of Mouseburg. The plot sees Jack encountering a variety of friendly and seedy folks who offer banter, side missions, or information, and the voicework of Troy Baker as Jack and then the rest of the cast bring the world and its furry denizens to life. The writing is genuine and intriguing, helping to make you feel transported to its crime noir setting. Of course, the fact that nearly everyone you meet is a mouse, rat, or shrew gives the dialogue a contrasting irony that works well.

With a new lead in mind, Jack hops into his automobile and rolls around town to the next unlocked destination, which includes an opera, a subway, a laboratory and others. The stages are quite linear aside from a couple hidden secrets or areas, but I wish the incentive to explore were stronger. Of the hidden cash, ammo, and blueprints you find, only the lattermost feels meaningful since they allow you to upgrade your weapons. Completionists will have fun seeking out all the baseball cards, newspapers, and comic strips to collect, but these can also be purchased with the extra cash you pick up. The baseball minigame that uses the cards you acquire didn’t do much to hold my attention, and so back to shooting bad guys I went

The shooting gameplay feels pretty good overall, with a decent variety of enemies and weapons. The boss fights are particularly engaging and pretty tough, and I found myself wishing there were more of them because of how they offered a more novel encounter than the repetitive loop of the stages and their “kill room” design. One involves dodging a robot’s rotating laser beams and then ducking behind bulletproof glass to avoid an even more devastating blast. Along the way, Jack does acquire a handful of movement abilities, like a propeller tail to float across gaps and a grapple tail to swing on hooks, but these felt gimmicky rather than additive. One use of the mouse tail I did look forward to was the lock-picking minigame attached to some locked doors and loot boxes, some of which involved a time limit or a set number of moves. I also have to shout out the Devarnisher weapon for its ability to make quick work of enemies by coating and then disintegrating them, often with a single shot.

There’s a sweet spot in terms of length for a game like this, and Mouse: P.I. extends a bit too far into golden time such that the returns are diminishing. Because of the overworld and individual stages, the narrative is tasked with giving the game cohesion, a task that is largely successful. The flip side of this equation is that the stages themselves are less memorable because of how they play out in such a similar way. The ones that end without a boss fight always felt like a letdown, a feeling of “That’s it?” Fewer, more intricate stages, or possibly fewer trips back to the office with more story doled out each time would create a more consistent experience.

Mouse: P.I. for Hire contains an excellent 6 to 8-hour game that’s trapped in the body of a good 10 to 15-hour game. Despite its memorable, eye-catching art style, the lack of color ends up being another factor that makes the length less sustainable. Fortunately, excellent performances from the voice cast and compelling writing give Mouseburg a charming character all its own. Solid first-person shooter gameplay and unique bosses make it easy to recommend for fans of the genre, especially those who don’t mind the extended experience. Switch 2 players may particularly enjoy mouse mode, a fitting way to play, but there is some stuttering in Performance mode, which aims at 60 fps. If you love a good trenchcoat-clad, heat-packing hero with a wit as sharp as his cheese, go ahead and hire this mouse to take a sharp-toothed bite out of crime.