MOUSE: P.I. For Hire is a Crazy Noir Shooter with Serious Style!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZwLdyEt5xc

Call me guarded, but I don’t like to have my heart broken.  It sucks to anticipate a really cool-looking game and have it not be what my hopelessly optimistic monkey brain had envisioned.  That’s why I quite unfairly had put Mouse: P.I. For Hire firmly in the category of cautious anticipation.  Each trailer showed such a great mix of dedicated artwork, music, and sound design that I convinced myself this game would be mostly a gauntlet of fantastic 1920s-style rubber hose animation, and if we get a halfway decent shooter out of it too, we’ll count ourselves lucky. In advance of Mouse: P.I. for Hire’s hopefully final release date of April 16th, I’ve gotten a chance to try a demo lasting around 45 minutes that took me through the first major level of the game as well as a bite-sized snippet of its hub and explorable overworld And that was all it took to get me deeply, shamelessly hyped.

I am thrilled to report that Mouse: P.I. For Hire is so much more than a pretty face and yet can’t help but gush about the presentation first anyway.  The characters are the stars of the show, moving with such an authentically wobbly, wavy bounce that you hardly even want to stop looking at them to shoot them.  But doing so is hilariously brutal with the game’s arsenal of weapons – from a shotgun that can blow a head clean off to the Devarnisher that slowly poisons enemies until their skin and flesh literally melt off their skeleton.  It’s gruesome in only the way such old, goofy cartoons could’ve ever pulled off with a smile, and smile I did from the demo’s opening moments onward.  And visuals are far from the only presentational draw.  Mouse: P.I. for Hire sports a great soundtrack and absolutely phenomenal voice acting that often had me laughing out loud.  

The first-person shooting here isn’t going to be genre-defining, but so far it’s extremely fun with some clever design even from the limited batch of weapons and enemies I saw.  The game promises over a dozen options for weapons and equipment, and though I only had access to less than half of those, the ones that were there, Devarnisher especially, now have me praying for the arsenal to get even zanier until we’re halfway to playing Ratchet and Clank.  But even as is, everything feels great to shoot, with enemies having punchy, melodramatic death animations that at least so far, never get old.  I don’t want to keep reverting to talking about the visuals here but the fact of the matter is they do a lot to make the game as immersive as possible. 

Every time I watched an enemy turn into a couple of big white eyes on a pile of soot, or walked into a room with a sign on the wall saying “Totally Normal Wall” with a big X on it next to an exploding barrel, I knew that this experience was in the hands of those who know their source inspiration and know it well. The feel here is fast-paced, existing in its own little space somewhere between a boomer shooter and Doom Eternal. It feels too modern to firmly be a boomer shooter, ironically, yet maintains the genre’s focus on fast, unrealistically punchy gameplay, a compelling enemy variety, and exploration-focused feel. And neither is it the aggressive, intensely stressful experience of Doom Eternal, where I felt like a half-second pause could mean immediate death (though like Doom Eternal, there is some minor platforming here). Mouse: PI for Hire can hold its own in terms of difficulty, especially in the really fun boss battles I had to try a few times, but its middle-of-the-road difficulty setting isn’t too taxing so far, and emphasized keeping me moving through the demo rather than demanding serious skill. I’m okay with that, especially because higher difficulties are available.

The story, an authentically noir tale that half pretends to play it straight despite the constant absurdity of it all, is actually interesting so far. You play as Jack Pepper, a detective on a missing person’s case that will take him through the deepest, darkest pits of Mouseburg as he picks apart a wild conspiracy. The writing is solid, the voice acting is, once again, spectacular all around, and I’m actually curious what happens next. I couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed that Jack has a detective board to arrange clues and yet all of them get arranged for me. Time will tell if investigation mechanics play any meaningful role here, but so far, I don’t get a sense that they do, with shooting being the overwhelming majority of what you’ll be doing. But hey, there is a lockpicking minigame at least, and it’s pretty good so – I’ll take it.

I’m going to try not to wax poetic about Mouse: PI for Hire too hard, since 45 minutes is presumably a very small chunk of this game. Time will tell if its shooting could get stale, if its enemy variety is consistent, and if the story ends up paying off. But from what little I’ve seen, I would be very surprised if this isn’t a modern classic in the making. April 16^th better hurry it up.