Mouse: P.I. for Hire Review (Switch 2)

With Mouse: P.I. for Hire, I’ve got very little to complain about, so for the sake of balance, first I’ll gently shine a light on its near-absurd mishmash of influences.

The striking rubber-hose animation USP hails from the 1920s. The 11-hour story, with its tough, unsentimental protagonist, and its twists and turns through layers of complicated corruption and conspiracy, grows directly from the roots of film and literary noir – most often associated with the 1940s. The hyperactive, running-and-gunning gameplay weaves and blasts as hectically as any ‘boomer shooter’ from the 1990s – and even then, a number of quality-of-life features seem to have origins from the 2000s and beyond.

It took an hour, maybe two, for the game to shine for me – but once it did, my playthrough went on and on delightfully. The slow start was forgiven in no time, and this tale of mouse P.I. Jack Pepper soon became one I needed to see through to its conclusion.

Early on, Jack receives a heads-up that an old associate has gone missing, and the investigations that follow delve deep into a sequence of potentially connected mysteries.

Soon, worldbuilding and storytelling titbits shone through like light from cracks in a secretive doorway. I learned about some big war that happened in the not-too-distant past – a societal rift so strong that the era beforehand is now known as ‘The Old World’. Elsewhere, shrews — looked down upon by snobby denizens as an inferior, poverty-stricken class — have been disappearing. Next, a politician, thanks to Jack’s quick wits during an investigation into the Mouseburg Opera House, avoids assassination.

More and more threads combine within an ever-tightening narrative – a narrative instigated by some combination of a group of fascist rodents, scientists experimenting with forbidden secrets, cults, and, at times, more horrific creatures.

For me, every bit of the adventure landed well. Sure, the storytelling is a little ‘tropey’, and you’ll never hear as many cheese puns as you do within the first few hours, but the well-written script is delivered with high-quality, delightful voice acting. What’s more, the storytelling verve — the visuals, cutscenes, and the mood-setting music — leave just the right amount of space for characterisation, and for one or two genuine emotional beats.

These great strengths smoothed over my initial concerns that the FPS gameplay might get repetitive quickly. There is a slight sense of routine to the shooting: you reach new areas and fight off waves of enemies that pour out of doors, the start and finish of each wave marked by the ding ding ding of a boxing match. 90% of the combat is structured like this — essentially as arena battles — with the rest made up of some bosses and some more organic ‘chance’ encounters in hallways, sewers, woodlands, and the like.

Happily, a sense of progression soon kicks in, keeping things fresh. Suddenly I was unlocking new moves — double jumps, grappling hooks — and new guns and powerful upgrades. The challenge amped up, and I found myself fully engaged with switching between shotguns, automatics, bazookas, and more, while launching myself around areas in the game with a slickness that contrasted the slower, laborious-to-produce look of the animation style.

And sure, it seems certain that plenty of hard-wrought animator sweat went into this production from start to finish. Debut developers Fumi Games, from Warsaw, even lampoon this idea early on during an incursion into a shady film studio. Hunched at their desks, mousy animators sketch away while a gunfight erupts around them. On and on they draw, without looking up.

Except for the environments, which are rendered in 3D and do a decent job at keeping up with the overall style, every little detail is animated, and it all looks impressive: new upgrades to your guns clicking into place; violent kicks to the faces of enemies; shoving a fistful of bullets into the shotgun to reload; the car as you drive around the very Cuphead-feeling map.

It’s the same thing during the kinetic combat. You launch into the air, a cartoonish poison-laden, gangster-dissolving gun chugging into gear. You whip 180 degrees, catch a glimpse of bat-wielding, hand-drawn mobs chasing you and a few more cartoon goons lumbering over behind them. All the while, animated bullets fizz by your head from the cartoon gunmen eyeing you up in the distance.

Even the moments of downtime between missions, when you return home to piece together clues, are teeming with animated characters. There are a few limitations in the style — the mice, rats, and shrews are paper-like and flat and can look as much if you catch them from the wrong angle — but then animating side views and back views for the abundance of assets in the game would have been a task as large as a post-WW1 zeppelin, and we all know how that ended.

I was briefly disappointed by a lack of motion controls. I tried out mouse controls for the review (but come on – is anyone really playing like that?) and sure, they work. Performance, while never distracting me, did stutter at times. Interestingly, Mouse: P.I. for Hire worked a lot better in the (I believe) locked 30fps of ‘Quality’ mode than the more ambitious frame rate of ‘Performance’ mode. (If you’re interested, the team released a full breakdown of the specs on the game’s website).

But these issues were never more than minor distractions. One more concern — that collecting clues is a shallow experience achieved by completing levels — may disappoint some people, but I didn’t mind, and I enjoyed seeing the collected photos, notes, and secret letters take shape as I pinned them to my corkboard back in the office.

To riff a moment on noir classic Chinatown, let me sum things up by saying this: When a game is right, it’s right. And this one here is right.