Mouseburg, 1934. A place I’d never been before, but it felt familiar, like reheated cheese on a plastic ashtray. A city filled with animals of all kinds, mice, rats, mice, shrews, mice, other rodents, the occasional alligator. A monochrome city, the air thick with jazz and the writing thicker with puns.
We’ve been here before, even if it wasn’t here. I’ve smoked many a cigarette in many a roadhouse, but MOUSE: P.I. For Hire is pulling at some very specific strings. The game it reminds me most of isn’t a shooter, it’s the point-and-click adventure Chicken Police – Paint it RED!. Like MOUSE: P.I. For Hire, Chicken Police takes place in a fictional town filled with anthropomorphized animals. Like Chicken Police, MOUSE puts you in the role of a detective forced to solve a noir-themed murder mystery.
But unlike Chicken Police, MOUSE: P.I. For Hire gives you a gun.
Many guns. Lots of guns. Upgradable guns, in the BioShock sense, where you must choose which weapon to spend your upgrade points on and each new upgrade changes the visual appearance of the weapon.
If you’re here, you’ve seen the images, you probably watched the video, you know what the game looks like. That’s a big selling point, for sure. Cuphead proved people want hand-drawn animation in the style of the early 1900’s, and MOUSE: P.I. For Hire is riding that wave as best it can.
It’s not quite a 2.5d boomer shooter though, because the levels are clearly made using 3D models. It’s just the animated objects, the enemies and NPCs and yourself, that are hand-drawn and rotate like DOOM sprites if you walk in circles around them. A real Fallen Aces vibe. It’s a mix that mostly works thanks to the flat black-and-white art style, but the juxtaposition between the hand-drawn animations and the fully 3D levels means MOUSE: P.I. For Hire never looks quite as good as Cuphead still does.
As a shooter, it’s quite fun, although some of the weapons lack a certain ‘punchiness’ which FPS games like Ion Fury and other Duke Nuke’Em spiritual successors excel in. It plays like a mix between games like Duke 3D (multiple paths, hidden secrets, collectibles) and a linear shooter adventure, occasionally peppered with immersive sim elements like lots of vents to crawl through or boxes to climb.
Of course, there’s two sides to every cheeseboard, and if you thought that was a tortured analogy you will likely abhor the writing in MOUSE: P.I. For Hire, which is crammed thicker than a suitcase full of gruyere with nonsensical references to cheese and mice. Chicken Police also jumped between hard-boiled detective stories and animal puns, but MOUSE does not find the proper balance nearly as well. The sheer amount of bad puns, unfunny references to pop culture, and dull delivery of dialog (can we please stop just assuming Troy Baker will be good because his name is Troy Baker, please?) made each conversation about as grating as a parmesan’s assistant.
For a game called P.I. For Hire, MOUSE has shockingly little detective work. There is a “board” where you place “clues” in your office, but this is just a series of button presses the player clicks while the main character talks to himself. There is no deduction, there is no reasoning, there is just a prompt titled “resolve” that appears once you have clicked the button enough times. People looking for an actual detective experience will not find that here.
To me, the best part of the game is how the missions are broken up by trips to and from your detective office. There’s nothing massively complicated going on, it’s just nice to see how your little corner of town evolves as the (admittedly dumb) story progresses. There’s an overworld map section that feels ripped DIRECTLY from Cuphead which is also fun to traverse, and each mission (apart from a few of the lengthier ones) clocks in at a perfectly reasonable time, often complete with unique and genuinely enjoyable boss fights.
MOUSE: P.I. For Hire is a mixed bag. A mixed 32 oz. bag of finely shredded fiesta blend, with Monterey jack, queso quesadilla, and asadero cheeses. It’s perfect to sprinkle and has great meltability, and the easy-to-open, resealable package helps to maintain freshness between servings. The thing is, there’s only six grams of protein in each serving, and it can’t really hold a sandwich together. If you’re really hungry, you’re probably better off eating something else.
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