Thanks to PlaySide and Fumi Games for the code!

If you ever have to explain a joke, it has already lost its ability to be funny. This is less because you have to deconstruct the joke and expose its inner workings, because even the greatest comedians can still get a laugh out of you while breaking down a joke. It tends to kill the comedy because you are forced to let that one punchline linger and linger to the point where its potency is dulled. Much of the appeal of a punchline comes from the surprise or, if telling a known or well telegraphed joke, the catharsis in having the anticipated end finally arrive. So, once you land a good punchline, it’s best to only let it linger long enough for a laugh to calm back down instead of trying to build onto it too much more. That’s why the best punchlines are often preceded by loads of build up to make that final release all the sweeter.

Mouse: P.I. For Hire is a joke, and a lot of the time it’s a pretty good joke. But it is a joke with a punchline that lasts way too long, and at that point, it’s hard to say if it was ever funny at all.

Mouse is the first project from Fumi Games, but I was first made aware of the game several years ago with one small, work-in-progress video that went viral. It showed off the game’s 1930’s animation style, and immediately stood out to any shooter fan, let alone game player more broadly. It truly does have a fantastic look, with interactables catching your eye against stationary levels with their bounding idle animations and equally bouncy character designs. Almost the entire game is exclusively in black and white, and the game almost manages to use its artstyle and environmental variety to keep the game from getting too stale, but in the end it does lose that battle.

Character animations are novel, but do not hold up under scrutiny, especially when zoomed in on during character dialog. There seems to be a strange attempt at lipsyncing that seems to be done by playing parts of a character’s idle animation back and forth, which makes characters jitter in strange ways. But worse than that, characters will remain in that idle animation no matter how charged their dialogue might get, with extremely rare exceptions. It makes some of the vocal performances, which are often pretty great, seem disjointed as the words don’t often match the physicality of the character speaking.

Furthermore, there is a strange wobbly filter that fades in and out that can only be seen on purely black scenes. This is really only something that pops up in menus and in the game’s opening logos, but when it pops up in the game’s many load screens, it can be a nuisance without any obvious reason for it to exist, as I only could see it during these pitch black scenes.

But worst of all, the black and white art style absolutely outstays its welcome by the end of the game. It’s not that it starts to ever look worse, but as the game continues to scrape the bottom of the barrel for enough novelty to justify its extreme runtime, it can only deploy so much visual variety to generate that novelty. There is one admittedly cool level near the end where color is very briefly introduced, and in a way that playfully calls back to the history of American cinema.  But other than that, the artstyle plays it pretty straight all the way through, which can be a problem when the rest of the game gets stale by the end.

That rest of the game is a boomer shooter, which is a genre I’ve come to adore lately. While I haven’t played every classic of this emerging sub-genre yet, like Ultrakill and Ion Fury, I have played and fallen in love with titles like Dusk, illWill, and Nightmare Reaper. Shooters may very well be my favorite genre of video game, so believe me when I solemnly say that Mouse is only a decent shooter. This is often the case with games that place 2D characters in a 3D world, as any moves those characters make have to be animated instead of a dynamic physics system taking over. So any reaction to bullet impacts, headshots, elemental damage, or stagger damage have to have a specific animation, which makes those actions happen in a pretty rigid manner. This can be enhanced with more impactful sound design to make weapons feel like they pack a punch, but none of the weapons quite nail that punchiness in the audio.

There is actually a pretty wide variety of weapons on display. Not only do they have the classic pistol, shotgun, and SMG, but there are some more novel picks like an ice beam, toxic waste launcher (known as a Varnisher), and a throwable dynamite (which seems like a nod at the Monolith classic, Blood). These weapons add variety to gunfights, but injecting that variety is left almost exclusively to the player. This is because the enemies never force you to mix up your weaponry, as a few select weapons can answer any attack thrown your way. Sure, TNT may take down a cluster of enemies if you can catch them when grouped up, and Varnishing a flying enemy will have them crash down into a Varnish bomb that dissolves any nearby foes. But 95% of all combat encounters can be conquered with just the James Gunn (Tommy’s lesser known brother) because nearly every enemy has the same amount of health and one of two strategies on how to kill you: shoot you from afar or run up in your face for a melee attack. There is one bigger enemy that charges at you swiftly and takes much more ammo to put down, but none of his other allies inject enough dynamism into combat to keep it from often feeling like a glorified shooting gallery. Ammo scarcity and boredom from using one weapon are the only two things stopping you from just using the James Gunn on everyone, but ammo isn’t even all that scarce, and by the end of the game, my urge to finally see the end outweighed my urge to mix up the weapons and prolong combat even further.

As a boomer shooter, the game does also have many hidden secrets, and many of them are hidden in ways that were novel to discover. But almost as many of them were hidden by the same mechanism time and time again: a lock you must lockpick with your tail. This mechanic, to be clear, is pretty genius, as it’s one of the few Mouse-infused aspects of the game that doesn’t rely on a cheese pun. But it quickly gets overused, and when stakes are added to them in the form of failure states, it feels cheap that I had to reload saves just to have another shot at picking the lock. This problem became most clear when I would approach a door with a secret behind it, pick it, then be greeted with a safe with another pickable lock. The locks were never overly challenging to pick, even when timers and limits on moves were added, so they began to feel like busy work more than genuine brain teasers, which made them tedious to complete eventually.

Secrets are also one aspect of design that clashes with the rest of the game. Some of my favorite boomer shooters, like Prodeus, heavily encourage replayability by hiding collectables all over the map, many of which can only be accessed once you return to the level with abilities gained later in the game. Mouse has secrets, and they are fun to find, but it can be tricky to know how long you have to find them. None of the levels in Mouse can be replayed after completion, and most levels block off earlier parts once you make it to the end for narrative reasons. So, whenever I saw a hint that a secret was nearby, I tried looking for a way to it in my immediate vicinity instead of trusting that I would be able to circle back around to it later in the level. There were plenty of times where I accidentally shut myself out of additional money or weapon schematics for upgrades just because I accidentally stepped into a boss fight or triggered a story moment that destroyed the door I just walked in through. It’s frustrating to have a tally of all of the baseball cards, newspapers, and clues I could have snagged if I just poked my nose down the right path before I was cut off from it, and that can be frustrating in a genre where that isn’t often a problem. But Mouse is one of the rare bomber shooters that feels like it wants to be a lot more than that.

Throughout the game, you gain a double jump, a helicopter-tail glide, a grappling hook, a wall run, and a wall climb. By the end of the game, you have a moveset rivaled only by Titan pilots and Doom Slayers, but the game is so rigid in how these mechanics are used that they don’t make nearly the impact they would otherwise. Wall runs and climbs can only happen on specifically marked surfaces, and your glide and grapple hook abilities are just as extremely contextual. Even the feel of using these abilities isn’t the most engaging, as the feedback makes you feel more like a camera moving around 3D space than a physical adult mouse with a gravelly voice. There’s a version of this game where the platforming mechanics feel more integrated with the combat, but with exception to a boss fight or two, jumping around is segmented into specific platforming segments where enemies are rarely present.

Speaking of boss fights, these are the highlight of the game for me. Where arena after arena of regular enemies got tiring after the first half of the game, the few boss fights sprinkled in made gameplay so much more engaging. These fights felt like duels against foes who could actually give me a run for my money, like the first encounter with the Marauder in Doom Eternal. These boss fights got me to lean forward in between some pretty long stretches of passively mowing down mindless hoards. I don’t want to spoil them, but I greatly appreciated how much they tested my ability to master all the mechanics of the game, especially with the final boss. In fact, where the combat arenas of the rest of the game feel like sandboxes where all the tools given feel redundant as they all lead to the same end in very similar ways, the boss fights felt more like a call and response. I could still use any weapon in my arsenal for the bosses, but even when I went back to the James Gunn once again, tracking my target and dodging their attacks made waiting for that opening to unload feel more engaging.

Overall, I think the combat could use a bit more authored intent behind it. In the same way that platforming challenges in this game force you to use certain mechanics, there should be enemy types that encourage you to use certain weapons. Without that pushback from the game, I’m free to find the method of least resistance through the game, which does mean I’m partially responsible for getting bored with the combat. But if there’s no Devil May Cry style scoring system to encourage creative and varied play, and no enemy variety forcing me to switch up my weaponry, then I can’t help but feel the game itself is still responsible for allowing that response to be a viable one.

The story is…well to be honest with you it’s a convoluted mess. It’s not just that it’s too complex with too many side characters and seemingly massive plot points getting thrown around to keep up, but also it just has no emotional core to stand on. I understand this is a game about talking mice with guns that smoke cigarettes and use cheese in just about every cultural expression they can. But the game brings up so many serious topics that it feels insane to see it treat those topics so flippantly. For example, shrews are in the game and treated as second class citizens, like many real people of many different races were treated in the time period of the game. There’s even a level where you catch corrupt cops abusing shrews in what was a massive coverup scandal. But that metaphorical racism loses any weight when it has to exist in a world where magic, mad science, and the literal Christian Hell all also exist. This is a cartoon world where nothing should be expected to be grounded in any reality, so why reach at all for real world parallels if you are so giddy to jump the shark anyway? It makes for a frustrating juxtaposition that disappointed me as the game got crazier and crazier in the final few levels.

The dialogue also began to grate as the game went on. As I mentioned earlier, the performances are great. Not only does Troy Baker do well with the material he’s given as Jack Pepper, but Camryn Grimes (as Tammy Tumbler) gives a convincingly scrappy performance of a teenager with a tragic past and Frank Todaro (as Cornelius Stilton) gives a convincingly mournful and experienced performance of a politician trying to make up for his past failures. But the lines these people are given are just so goddamn goofy. Every single line, joke or exposition, is delivered straight, which is sometimes successful, similar to moments in the latest Naked Gun reboot. But every instance of “cheese” in the script is annoying to hear.

I know the complaint of “too many cheese jokes” in a game about cartoon mice seems absurd, I too saw that IGN review. But I’m sorry to say he has a point, there are too many cheese jokes. But the problem comes not from their amount, but from how casually they are used. For example, some mice are referred to as “cheeseleggers” which implies that, in this universe, cheese is akin to alcohol. But later on, another mouse will be referred to as a “cheesehead”, which I can only assume is similar to a crackhead in real life. So, then, which is it? Is cheese a fairly harmless party depressant that is temporarily and unjustifiably illegal, or is it a hardcore substance that can potentially kill you with one taste and is highly likely to cripple you through addiction? These are only two instances, but cheese, or some synonym of it, is used so frequently in conversation, and as a replacement for so many human concepts, that any mention of cheese in the script loses meaning. Once the importance of “cheese” as a word loses all narrative meaning, it then only becomes another lazy way to comically remind the player that they are, indeed, in a world of mice, which stops being funny only a few hours in. It feels like, other than the mechanics that involve tails like lockpicking and grappling, the constant mentions of cheese are the only thing in the world of Mouse that distinguishes the story from happening in the real world.

It reeks of a game whose primary goal was to evoke the memory of Steam Boat Willy and other classic Disney animations, not build an engaging and original world all on its own. In fact, so much of the game feels less motivated by if it would fit into the pacing of a narrative or the logic of a lived-in world and instead just feels like a parade of every idea the studio could come up with. Instead of one visit to a movie studio with a few references to some classic movies, we get at least three visits, with each referencing one or two different classic films. Instead of one visit to a harbor or swamp level, we have nearly 5 of them, with one of which turning into an underwater scuba diving expedition. Time and time again, a good and fun idea for a level either gets repeated until it no longer impresses, or just goes on way too long to remain novel. If not for this constant remixing, not quite reusing, of content the game might have found a nice, moderate length to end on, somewhere in the range of 5-8 hours. But this game took me 14 hours to complete.

Brevity is the soul of wit, so if a joke is to remain funny, you have to be quick about telling it. But Mouse: PI For Hire is not quick, or really brief, about much at all, which is a shame because it has enough going for it that brevity could have been a powerful asset. It does not have the best feeling combat, nor the best feeling platforming, but when delivered in short bursts over a few hours, it could have remained fun. The dialog is nerve wracking by the time you hit double digit hours of listening to it, but about half of that time spent with the same cheesy lines may have left less time for those lines to rot and stink. And even a fairly fun baseball card game can’t help the game much, as its existence further justifies my point: this game is not good enough for there to be this much of it.

My time with Mouse has made me reflect on one of my favorites of 2025: Shooty Shooty Robot Invasion. I thought about it so much because it has so many similarities with Mouse, but managed to leave a stronger impact on me. Shooty also pulls from an artstyle and vibe of the past, but it uses an excess of color to visually simulate so much more throughout its runtime. Shooty also has pretty mediocre combat and platforming, but it puts much more emphasis on its narrative and humor to successfully distract from that. Shooty also has a script full of rapid fire jokes, but it also manages to ground its narrative and characters in relatable and understandable struggles so that their silly escapades actually engage rather than make you roll your eyes. And surprisingly, Shooty is also way longer than I thought it would be at 20 hours, but its story picked up my engagement and ran with it from where the gameplay had left it.

From thinking about my time with Shooty Shooty Robot Invasion, I’ve come to understand that a game like Mouse can indeed work, and its flaws are not inherent to its form by any means. But I think for many it is able to coast on just how striking its style is. Shooty also has incredible art, but it clearly looks quite a bit more modest than Mouse. Despite the finer details showing some cut corners, or at least just some unrealized potential in polish, Mouse manages to have a novel presentation at first glance. For many, that vibe of classical animation is enough sauce to make the whole dish taste good. But I guess I’ve just had this kind of dish just a few too many times for some good sauce to really blow my skirt up. Sauce is appreciated, and often vital for a game to be great. But a great game needs more than sauce to be great. I’m sorry to say that Mouse is way more sauce than substance, but considering just how good this sauce is, I will hold out some hope that their next dish will be a bit heartier.