Ah, now here’s a game I was really hoping I’d get to review. Given its reputation and “overwhelmingly positive” Steam reviews, I think this is a game that needs little (if any) introduction. What we’ve got here is Mouse: P.I. for Hire, developed by Fumi Games and published by PlaySide. Mouse: P.I. for Hire is a first-person “boomer shooter” game in the hand-drawn rubber-hose animation style common in very early animated cartoons. You play as Jack Pepper, the titular mouse and private investigator for hire. Jack is a no-nonsense former cop trying not to drown in debt.

Mouse: P.I. for Hire is set in 1934, and its story takes place in a rodent-themed parody of Los Angeles. As a for-hire private investigator, Jack Pepper will take any case he can get if he thinks it’ll make him enough money to keep the bookies and loan sharks off his back for another day or two. What Jack doesn’t realize, however, is that over the course of Mouse: P.I. for Hire’s campaign, he’s going to find himself grappling with all sorts of hot-button societal issues, many of which are still prevalent in the real world to this day.

Those issues include rather sensitive topics like police corruption and brutality, racism (mainly mice versus shrews), organized crime, and bootlegging, which, in this context, is called “cheeselegging,” because of course it is. The vast majority of the humor in Mouse: P.I. for Hire leans pretty heavily on the whole “mice like cheese” idea. Different forms of cheese are used as unsubtle stand-ins for things like alcohol, cigarettes, and marijuana, as well as invoked in place of different swear words. It’s a good thing I greatly enjoy terrible, groan-inducing puns, because Mouse: P.I. for Hire is absolutely chock full of them.

There are a fair few jokes in Mouse: P.I. for Hire that involve neither mice nor cheese, such as the equivalent of the Thompson machine gun (aka “Tommy gun”) being called the “James gun,” a likely nod to James Gunn, the filmmaker who had better not mess up the DC Comics Extended Universe. There’s also the heavy prevalence of “old cartoon logic” in gameplay and humor alike. As an example of that, you learn to double jump by gluing springs to the soles of your shoes. You’ll also frequently pick locks by inserting your tail into them to press the lock’s tumblers into place.

Putting aside the quirks of the setting and humor of Mouse: P.I. for Hire, those aspects are mixed with a solid and highly enjoyable core gameplay loop. As a first-person “boomer shooter” not unlike the original version of Doom, you’ll amass quite the arsenal of weaponry as you progress through the campaign of Mouse: P.I. for Hire. Much of what you’d expect to be standard fare in that department is present, such as pistols, shotguns, rocket launchers, machine guns, and the like. However, your weapons are just as thoroughly covered in old cartoon aesthetics as the rest of Mouse: P.I. for Hire.

You’ll need all the firepower you can get your mousey hands on, since you’ll be fighting through legions of stereotypical mobsters, crooked police officers, cultists, and all sorts of other unsavory types as you track down leads and work toward solving every detective case you take on. I really like the little animations that accompany each of your weapons and your health meter. Those might seem like small, unnecessary, hard-to-notice additions, but I see them as additional evidence that quite a lot of passion and careful attention to detail were put into developing Mouse: P.I. for Hire.

You can’t save your progress at any time, from anywhere in Mouse: P.I. for Hire, but level checkpoints, autosave points, and typewriters that serve as manual save points are so frequent that that potential restriction was nowhere close to problematic for me. For transparency’s sake, I should mention I played Mouse: P.I. for Hire on its easiest difficulty setting; save points and much of the core gameplay loop might be very different on higher difficulty settings. Mouse might be a “boomer shooter” not dissimilar to the original Doom, but its gameplay also features several fairly new amenities to the genre.

For instance, you don’t have a map of any of the in-game levels, but you can use the “Detective Brush” at any time. This will spawn a small brush that shows you exactly where to go at any given time during a mission. Things like this and the abundant save points might be seen as holding the player’s hand too much, but I’m really glad those parts of the gameplay formula are present. After all, the core of Phenixx Gaming’s mission statement is championing the cause of making games as accessible as possible, and Mouse: P.I. for Hire clearly considers accessibility important.

There are a few potential downsides of Mouse: P.I. for Hire that I want to briefly acknowledge. As a first-person shooter, the core gameplay loop obviously revolves around a lot of violence, even if it is all in black and white rather than color. You can turn blood effects off if you wish, however. I encountered several points where the in-game captions didn’t entirely match the spoken dialogue, which always irks me somewhat. Lastly, just to really hammer this point home: If you hate bad puns and/or “cartoon logic,” you’ll probably hate Mouse: P.I. for Hire.

Luckily for me, I thrive on that kind of humor, and the violence that inevitably results from the quite enjoyable core gameplay loop doesn’t bother me in the slightest. If either (or ideally both) of those things are true for you as well, I would gladly and wholeheartedly recommend that you check out Mouse: P.I. for Hire. If your heart isn’t firmly set on playing Mouse: P.I. for Hire as soon as you possibly can, though, I’d suggest waiting for a decent sale. The $30 price tag might be a rather pungent bit of cheese for some of our audience to swallow.

A PC review copy of Mouse: P.I. for Hire was provided by PlaySide for this review.

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MOUSE: P.I. for Hire

$29.99

8.5

Score

8.5/10

Pros

• Highly enjoyable gameplay loop that’s easy to learn.
• Great voice acting.
• Several helpful accessibility options for those who need them.

Cons

• Aesthetics and sense of humor might be deal breakers for some players.
• Occasional partial or total mismatches between captions and spoken dialogue.
• Some topics addressed in the story may be uncomfortable.