Mouse P.I. For Hire review: a monochrome tale with a ton of personality

Noir fiction works best for me when it’s played straight: hardboiled, down-on-their-luck detective, trying earnestly to carve out a corner of the world where they can drink themselves into oblivion. I’m a simple man with simple tastes. A noir detective story where the protagonist (and the majority of the world, for that matter) are mice? I don’t know about that.

Mouse PI For Hire is the story of Jack Pepper, a character very similar in style to my aforementioned tastes, although he has a tail. And he enjoys cheese. A lot. It’s a pastiche to end all pastiches, and before I played the demo, I wasn’t sure whether it would be too much to bear. Turns out it wasn’t, until it was, then it kind of wasn’t again.

A first-person shooter with its roots firmly in the golden era of FPS, Mouse PI is a bit Doom, with the 2D sprites beelining to your character at all times and secrets hidden away in dark corners; it’s a bit Half-Life in a way, too, with set pieces and semi-open levels punctuating what is otherwise a linear experience. It’s good, if a bit simple, with a ton of personality to drag it over the line.

Jack does a bunch of little jobs, making just enough to keep him in cheese, until, like many others in his line of work, he stumbles onto something much bigger. It’s all missing damsels and shrew conspiracies, and there’s a minigame where you play baseball with cards. That last one is just okay.

Jack works out of an office in a bad part of town, a bad part of town that I called home in between missions – there’s a bar, a mechanics shop where I could upgrade my weapons, and a shop that I never used. It was quite nice coming back home after each excursion, and getting into a rhythm of talking to the locals and pinning my clues on my corkboard reset the tempo before it was time to get back to it.

The missions themselves are fairly simplistic – investigations are basically getting from A to B, finding a clue or somesuch, and fighting whatever boss happens to be in my way at the time. The areas are teeming with personality, so even though the game itself is in black and white, the environments aren’t at all dull.

I didn’t enjoy the sewers so much, but the harbour, haunted village, and movie sets were particular highlights, and barreling through these whimsical environments gave me plenty to look at, and plenty to keep going for, even if the shooting doesn’t change much from the first minute.

While I did want to see what was next from a visual perspective, I’ll admit that my attention started to wane around the mid-point of Mouse PI. The constant cheese references and puns wore me down a little. Troy Baker does his best Humphrey Bogart impression, and pulls it off; it fits perfectly, but the world becomes a little tiring after a while, until maybe I was so worn down with the gouda, and the mozzarella, and of course, the cheddar, that I started loving it again.

Mouse PI is a feast for the eyes, with its rubber hose style creating movement and life in even the smallest of things. Dandelions bounce as I mow down hordes of enemies, and little frogs stare at me with a vacant smile as I break into a third-floor window. Meeting the next oddball as I wander through this ever-unraveling mystery was great, and despite the aforementioned attention wane, it only took a gatekeeper with three undead wives to bring me back into the fold.

The shooting is serviceable enough, and finding a new weapon was always a bright spot, although some of them felt a little useless when I could just whip out the Tommy gun (the James Gun, as it’s called. Docked points for that stinker) and wipe the floor with anything in my eyeline.

Mouse PI pairs a wonderful visual style with a story that goes places, and although the shooting didn’t quite catch me, I would fully recommend it to anyone with a penchant for either old cartoons, old shooters, or those who cannot get enough cheese puns.