Maybe you’re intimately familiar with Fleischer Studios’ 1930s cartoon classics; maybe your knowledge pretty much begins and ends with Studio MDHR’s glorious 2017 video game homage, Cuphead. Either way, you’ll immediately know what Mouse P.I. for Hire is going for, and developer Fumi Games pretty much nails the “rubber hose” look. This is black-and-white era Fleischer meets 1940s detective noir; and there’s even a bit of old-school Disney thrown in, given the seedy world of Mouse P.I. – Mouseberg – looks like it’s populated by long lost, down-on-their-luck relatives of early days Mickey.
It’s got bags of style, then. And from its sultry, jazzy theme music to its grizzled mouse protagonist Jack Pepper (voiced by Troy Baker), even the multitude of options enabling you to degrade the picture and sound – piling on grain, film damage, audio distortion – Fumi Games work hard to convincingly sell its blend of noir and old-school cartoon. And yes, Mouse P.I. consistently looks great, whether you’re bounding through the spooky moonlit ravine that began my demo playthrough, the sprawling underground science lab that follows, or, later still, the grimy city street that serves as Mouse P.I.’s hub – with its bustling crowds of rodent ne’er-do-wells, its speakeasy and shadowy back alleys, and even Pepper’s own filed-strewn office.
It’s gloriously animated too; weapons (this being an FPS and all) waggle cheerfully as you sprint around the place, reloads seeing you pulling great fists of ammo out of thin air then shoving them haphazardly into whatever opening you can find. And it’s full of wonderfully cartoonish violence – enemies exploding at shotgun impacts, or melting down to a surprised skeleton when you hit them with your turpentine gun. But crucially, its visual language, which could easily tip into the unreadable given its endless stretches of monochrome, is carefully considered too. This might be a world of noirish light and shadow, but all its interactive elements – its enemies and ammo piles, its levers and collectible ephemera – are rendered in constantly dancing 2D, ensuring they’re easily identifiable in the 3D world.
All that, though, you could probably tell for yourself just by watching the trailer. The real surprise, for me at least, is how Mouse P.I. plays. Yes, (in the demo at least) it’s a largely linear first-person shooter with light puzzle elements, but it’s built around an appealingly elastic sense of momentum. There’s a double jump, for instance, that has exactly the right mix of weight and cartoonish defiance of gravity – and which is initially deployed across some light platforming as you bound your way up the ravine toward a creepy old mansion in search of a missing magician who’s possibly in cahoots with some Nazi-esque mouse cultists.
That double jump is paired with a swift sprint that ends in a sort of slick, quick ground slide; a short, sharp side-dodge; a rapid-access melee kick (handy to create some space if enemies get to close), and – if you really want to rough-and-tumble it – you can duke it out with your fists. It all makes for a zippy, nippy combat kit that, initially at least, felt like complete overkill. Enemies – from cultists to killer robots – aren’t exactly the most dynamic bunch; they tend to arrive in waves, meandering stupidly around each small arena, occasionally popping off a few rounds. That doesn’t make a favourable first impression, when skirmishes are at their simplest; but once I met Robot-Betty, a recurring mini-boss in the demo, and started to understand the combat rhythm Fumi Games’ is going for, that all changed.
Basically, this is a shooter built around chaos and constant movement. Robo-Betty’s attacks grow a little more elaborate each time she appears, and with each new encounter, the pace is increasingly frenetic. She’s got a four-pronged laser attack that spins around her body, for instance, forcing you to bound over and slide under her beams as you attempt to keep your reticule on-target. Then come the mines (later homing mines), further ratcheting up the momentum as you leap about, trying to catch Betty in their blast. You’ll deploy your kick to deflect her powerful close-quarter attacks, and end with a furious sprint to safety as she unleashes a devastating blast. It’s fast, it’s frantic, and the more I fought Betty, the more I found myself adopting its ceaseless rhythm elsewhere. By the end of the demo, I was careening around levels with abandon – zip-dashing and sliding, double jumping and mid-air blasting without pause to clear out its awkwardly placed enemies as bullets rained in from all sides. It’s fun!
And while it definitely wasn’t the pace I was expecting from a noir-styled cartoon shooter, by the time things were wrapping up, I was eager to play more. There’s other stuff I loved too, including a puzzley lock-picking mini-game requiring you to pop pins by nudging Jack’s tail around a maze-like space within a set number of moves – it’s quickfire and pleasingly thinky, and I genuinely found myself looking forward to the next one. This kind of tight design and polish is everywhere; even the brief bit of top-down driving you do to navigate the map between levels feels satisfying. In fact, about the only thing that irked me was the game’s sometimes wayward attempts at humour. When your art and sound teams are going all-out to conjure a specific mood, there’s something slightly obnoxious about present day pop culture references – a Love, Sex, Robots joke, for instance; a weapon called the “James Gun” – intruding on the tone. But generally, though, the writing is decent enough, so hopefully this stuff won’t get too out of hand.
And aside from that, I’m curious to see if there’s more to Mouse P.I.’s investigatory framework than mere thematic set-dressing. The seedy sidestreet HUB that featured briefly toward the end of my demo time teases some of the game’s surrounding structure – there’s a mechanic who’ll upgrade your weapons using the schematics you find out in the field, a reporter pumping you for leads between missions, a pinboard where you can assemble all your located clues – but how that sits alongside the central shooting action isn’t entirely clear. Regardless, this brief careen through Mouse P.I. suggests an enjoyably twitchy shooter with plenty of gorgeous presentational flair. So consider me intrigued ahead of its launch on 16th April.
