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Almost ten years ago, Cuphead felt like a merger between video games and the golden age of rubber hose animation. No one could have expected the success Cuphead would go on to enjoy, although I was most surprised by the fact that it has gone so long without imitation; perhaps it speaks to the perfectionism that goes hand-in-hand with artists, and how this style of animation falls apart at the seams if half-arsed. Just like the works of Walt Disney or Fleischer, something as carefully pieced together as Cuphead will endure the rigours of time and emerge unscathed in decades to come—but that’s also due to it being a tremendous, note-perfect run-and-gun shooter in its own right.
And that’s where Mouse: P.I. for Hire, despite its earnest attempts to create something honest and entrenched in a certain time with the same kinds of surrealist animation and a hard-boiled, noir setting, might lag a step or two behind something like Cuphead. It’s a stylistic force, but, beneath all of the wisecracks and smooth jazz that seeps from the seams of the game’s framework, Mouse appears to be a standard fare boomer shooter based on the small sliver sampled. With that said, just as a mouse doesn’t entrust its life to only one hole, I do hope the game has an ace or two up its sleeve.
The setup of the hands-on sees Jack uncovering and scouring a laboratory owned by missing magician, Steve Bandel, who has used his money to fund old-world scientists and their work for one reason or another. Among the clues, you’ll discover that the magic mouse had a few dark secrets of his own, including a deformed helper named Igor and more than a few robotic recreations of his once assistant, Betty, proving that sometimes grief takes strange forms. How this particular case fits into the wider narrative, I couldn’t say, but it sets up the offbeat, corrupt town of Mouseburg quite effectively.
So while it seems like there’s going to be meat to chew on, as well as a great detective mystery to unravel at the heart of PI for Hire, I didn’t necessarily walk away from this hands-on eager to see where the narrative threads go; but I’d chalk that up to the context of the demo and how it plops you into this one factory level. But judging by Jack’s evidence board, which we see in his office at the end, this expedition is just one that makes up a larger tapestry.
Mouse handles like a pretty standard boomer shooter, albeit with a few, well-placed modern touches. The gun feel is clearly inspired by the shooters of yesteryear, with no aim-down sights at all; it feels tailor-made for linear corridors, of which there are plenty. It’s Jack’s mobility that gives him an edge over the cultist mice and bots he encounters during this hands-on, with a lofty double jump and strafe dashing keeping him nimble during shootouts.
The weapon wheel, which had plenty of room for others to join the fight, is full of the expected players; there’s a pistol, a powerful boomstick shotgun, and a James Gun, which I expect is an allusion and clever pun to the Scooby Doo filmmaker of the same name. Being a close-quarters factory level, I opted for the explosive safety of the shotgun, though Mouse veers from the expected, having players unearth an experimental weapon within the stage, which, using corrosive toxins, melts enemy flesh from bone, which, due to the comical animation, isn’t as harrowing as it sounds.
Although I couldn’t see any means to upgrade weapons while on assignment, an eventual run-in with Tammy, a character with whom Jack has history, reveals a contraption she calls B.A.N.G., which makes use of the blueprints and resources Jack finds throughout levels to buff the weapons he’s got. Unless the system has been scaled back for the hands-on, none of the weapons have a particularly deep upgrade tree, although this could be simply because there are so many weapons to find in the final game.
Throughout the level on offer, the enemy variety was pretty limited. Cultist grunts and robot mice made up most of what I encountered, and they all fell without an enormous need for strategy. Despite being rather simple in isolation, the mini-boss encounters that led up to the end-of-stage boss, the aforementioned Betty, layered in many of the mechanics and learnings from the prior fights to create a finale that felt urgent and, unlike the entire level before it, dangerous.
The level itself, which begins in a guarded ravine before plunging into Bandel’s secretive, underground factory, is designed in a straightforward, linear manner, guiding Jack from fight to fight while still being pretty interactive. Although I didn’t notice certain genre hallmarks like key carded doors, there are several others, including secret areas, collectibles like cheddar (as in cash) and literal cheese, and well-hidden rewards that go towards the aforementioned upgrades. On top of this, Mouse might have the cutest lockpicking mechanic in recent memory as Jack uses his tail’s tip to carefully navigate and manipulate the inner workings of the lock to open doors and safes alike.
As a side-scrolling game, Cuphead benefited from being confined to strictly two-dimensional space. Playside has, through a mix of 2D and 3D techniques, brought its pulpy, hand-animated shooter to life by cleverly mixing character, gun, and item sprites with rendered three-dimensional environments. The liveliness and trademark “rubber hose” bounciness comes via the sprites themselves, whether it’s the creative reload animations or something as small as the old-fashioned, ink ribbon typewriter, which allows the player to save, vibing along to the pacy, uptempo jazz soundtrack.
There’s no question that Mouse is an immensely stylish shooter with its visual flair harkening back to the time of Steamboat Willie, not long after Walt Disney smartly listened to his wife and named his mascot Mickey, not Mortimer. Like gumshoe films of old, it has a black and white film noir aesthetic that gives me a hankering for a cigarette and a stiff drink.
Troy Baker’s turn as Jack Pepper feels prototypically gruff and hard-boiled to the point where Baker melts into the role, spitting out one-liners at a rate that’d make Duke Nukem blush. Although I get the sense Jack’s “closed book” nature might grow tiresome, Baker is adept enough to let that hardened exterior chip away throughout the course to have the character be more than the rodent equivalent of Duke Nukem.
Based on the level sampled, Mouse: P.I. for Hire is a gorgeous game and a fine example of strong art direction being enough to pull the cart along—for a while, that is. I’m uncertain at this stage whether Mouse will have the mechanical depth to go the distance, as what I played seems limited by its classical leanings. I expect the story’s big case to live up to the setting; my concern is that without a few unexpected gameplay hooks, Mouse might lack the knockout power to be one of the greats.
