GoKawiilLike any foolishly hopeful gamer, I sat in the darkness of my home, booting up a game I prayed would shine bright enough to live up to its promise. A black-and-white shooter set in a city full of mice? A classic cartoon animation style? A gumshoe noir plot? The idiosyncrasies stacked like Jenga blocks, and one faulty element could send the whole tower tumbling. But isn't that always the way in Gamer Town, where promising pitches are a dime a dozen, and few successfully pull off their daring dreams.
Mouse: P.I. For Hire, the long-awaited indie first-person shooter spawned from a post on X, is finally coming out on Thursday after years of trailers and teasers, and at a modest $30 price to boot. Though its creators from Polish studio Fumi Games insist that the game's look is more broadly inspired by the 1930s "rubber hose" style of animation popularized by Betty Boop and Fleischer cartoons, it's not hard to see visual similarities with Steamboat Willie, the black-and-white character that preceded Mickey Mouse. A lot of Mouse: P.I. For Hire's appeal lies in the vintage cartoony style contrasting with violent gunfire -- and after playing half a dozen hours of the game, that does make up a lot of its charm.
But it's a pleasure to discover all the visual style overlays a fairly involved narrative riddled with classic noir elements. Players control Jack Pepper, a war hero turned hard-boiled detective whose pursuit of a missing persons case leads him from the bright lights of Mouseburg's fine society to its seedy back alleys and dangerous criminal underbelly, uncovering a vast conspiracy in the process.
Mouse: P.I. For Hire is packed to the gills with noir staples like a gumshoe protagonist, a femme fatale love interest, political corruption, social inequality, dirty cops and a bulletin board where our detective fills in the case clue by clue. Despite the cartoon animation and rubber hose violence, the noir is played straight; it's clear that this is a love letter to the genre of detective fiction made famous by American fiction writers.
In conversation with Fumi Games lead producer Maciej Krzemień last June at Summer Game Fest, the team working on the game took inspiration from stories by famed noir writer Raymond Chandler, and the narrative leads did plenty of historical research to get the period right.
"Obviously, we are not Americans ourselves. We wanted to get a good grasp on this entire style of detective noir stories, but with some light-hearted elements to it," Krzemień told me.
A good chunk of the success of Pepper's character belongs to his voice actor, Troy Baker, who delivers one-liners and exposition in gravelly tones that fit a hard-boiled detective narrating the case throughout the game. The rest of the voice cast is suitably pleasant -- Florian Clare as journalist Wanda Fuller, Frank Todaro as politician and Pepper's war buddy Cornelius Stilton, among others -- giving a range of period-appropriate performances ranging from Mid-Atlantic faux-sophistication to a streetwise accent hailing from whatever New Jersey analogue they have near Mouseburg.
The dialogue is fittingly noir, and the writing in the game is a mix of 1930s-era dark humor and groan-worthy puns (which is a good thing, I swear). Mice end the day with a long pull of stinky cheese to take the edge off, bootleggers are "cheeseleggers," a gun modeled after the German Mauser pistol is named the Micer, and so on.
Though the game's soundtrack is an appropriate mix of big band and jazzy tunes, Mouse: P.I. For Hire's commitment to evoking the 1930s extends further. An optional filters layer in film grain and gauzy blur to the visuals, as well as degrading the audio quality of the music to sound like it's coming out of vinyl or wax cylinders. Looking and sounding more old-timey is a fun addition to the immersion.
But Mouse: P.I. For Hire is a shooting game first and foremost, and while its combat has more pros than cons, there are enough challenges in adapting its luscious animation style to 3D shooting to make it feel like a mixed bag.
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