This reviewer should never touch another video game..

So, MousePI4Hire got a review from IGN and it was, um, not well received. Let's find out why.

Let's find out.

I love noir. I'll take all kinds. The hardboiled detective, the seedy crime story,

neo-noir, classic pulp, you name it, I'm buying.

Okay.

Okay. the city crime story, neo-noir, not a, like an incredible author and writer would never do this, but somebody who was in AP English, they definitely would? I can immediately tell." I'm pretty excited about it, but noir isn't just an aesthetic to be thrown on like an old coat as you're leaving your office at the behest of a leggy blonde. While Mouse P.I. for Hire clearly understands the style and tropes of classic noir films and novels as well as 1930s cartoons more broadly, it doesn't seem

to get why those things are there or how they're used to tell compelling stories. By fusing a hard-boiled detecting mystery with a fast, retro-styled FPS, developer Fumi Games has made a shooter that is thematically incoherent, with the apparent aspirations of its story contradicted at every point by the actual action. Of all the steam libraries and all the PCs in all the world, Mouse PI for Hire walked into mine, and I wish I liked it more than I do.

It's over, you got nowhere left to run. I run to what the dream, a bright future ruled

by big mice.

Cheesy, real cheesy. Mouse fell to Jack Pepper, a private eye in a world where everyone is a mouse, after Wanda Fuller from the Mouseburg Herald sets him on the case of a missing magician.

I can give you more than a crumb, Jack. I can give you a magician.

As you'd expect, that spirals into a much bigger conspiracy that includes an attempt on a mayoral candidate's life and racially motivated mouse-on violence as big ol' mice oppress the smaller shrews.

Same as in-

What is shrew- nevermind.

Never was, even in Mouseburg.

And the requisite twists and turns you'd expect from any good detective story make

this tale solid enough.

What bothers me, however, is how overly referential so much of it is. The world is full of mice, so everything is about cheese. Everything. A bad guy? He's a cheese legger.

Run into a lady mouse with a sultry voice? It'll be described as someone need to assure you they're telling the truth? This is charming initially, then it never stops. Everything is a reference to the fact that everyone is a mouse and mice like cheese, and when it's not, instead it'll be a reference to an old cartoon, or the fact that this is a video game.

I should have probably guessed the former when one of the first things I saw was a steamboat named Willy but at least that and the reference heavy power ups are cute. Constant callbacks to classic films or other video games? Not so much. And it doesn't end there. A boss fight in the sewers? It's a literal alligator because of course it is. If you're looking for the alligator like so one of the criticisms of the game is there's an alligator in the sewer. I Mean like I really like are we on that level now are we in this situation? He's upset about an alligator damn, all right

Jesus Informing Jackal quip that he doesn't look like much of a boss, and then laugh at his own joke. The voice actors, led by Troy Baker, do an admirable job with what they have, but nothing in Mouseburg is allowed to just be. It has to be a mouse reference, or a literally cheesy one-liner, or a reference to something else.

It's hard to care about anything in MousePI for hire because it never stops making jokes about everything. better things. Is this the most Reddit review that you've ever seen? I think this must be, this might be the most Reddit review I've ever seen. This is really like, oh my God. Oh my, this is just crazy. Like he's just saying shit.

I know he's just saying shit.

That's enough, right?

Time to find someone higher up. Squeeze until they suck.

See here's the big problem that a lot of games reviewers have. Everything that you've been talking about is retarded and nobody cares about it. You have spent one third of the review complaining

about references to cheese. You haven't talked about the actual gameplay. You haven't talked about the actual gameplay, you haven't talked about the way that, you know, the environment is, you haven't talked about the world building, you haven't, well I guess you talked about world building to be fair, you haven't talked about like the overworld map, you haven't, there's like nothing about this is about a

video game. Nothing this has nothing to do with the actual video game. It's just bullshit.

At least the actual video game. It's just bullshit.

At least the shooting is better. This is the latest in a wave of boomer shooters inspired by old school FPS's like Dwarf Quake, and it's a decent one at that. You start with a pistol in Jack's fists, but you'll soon acquire a shotgun, dynamite, a James Gun, which is just a Tommy Gun, and more unique stuff like the Devarnisher, which shoots what looks like Elmer's glue that melts the flesh from your enemies bones, leaving only a skeleton. Throw in stuff like a double jump, dash, spinning tail for hovering, and a slide, and Jack's got some stylish moves when the bad guys show up. This ain't Quake, but it does feel good. It doesn't hurt that all of it from reload animations to random conversations is rendered in an absolutely gorgeous black and white mix of sprite work and 3d models. The world building is a great example of this. happened right? There's no way.

The audio may be thin, but MousePI for higher is still dressed to the nines. Even here though I have issues. Weapons can feel weak, especially the shotgun. It's got the audio kick of a pop gun, and there's a strange disconnect to seeing something that sounds like a kid's toy blow off some poor mouse's head as you paint the world with black ickor that spews from his neck. Enemies mostly come out of doors marked with a skull that you can't enter,

robbing these areas of anything remotely resembling a sense of place. Levels also

really like to play with the player's imagination, and it's a lot of fun to play with.

Which is, how many of you guys, whenever you were a kid, you could recognize, the guy's gonna come out of that barrel, because that barrel's animated differently? made it differently. I hate to tell you that, but I mean, that's continuity right there. It is. That's the way, that's the way it was. So obvious, right? Different color door. Yeah. Hold up. We're going to lock you in a room and throw baddies at you until they're dead or you are, schtick. Oh, a little too much for my taste. None of this is game breaking. The combat is fundamentally good enough to carry you to the end of the roughly 12-hour

campaign, but sometimes it feels like being at a show that's never quite bad enough to leave. And at least on the normal difficulty, health items are so generous there's rarely a challenge. Like any good boomer shooter, there are plenty of secrets to find, newspapers, weapon upgrades, cosmetics, baseball cards, and so on, fragile walls to blow up, and even locked safes to open with your tail, which pulls double duty as a lockpick. Some of these locks run a time limit, or must be solved in a limited number of moves, and

you only get one shot at the good stuff they hold. Others are so easy you could probably solve them by letting an actual mouse run across your keyboard. It's very jarring. Once you're done with the level, it's back to the hub, which encompasses Jack's office, the local bar, store, weapon upgrade shop, and the store. My favorite thing here is the baseball card minigame you can play at the bar.

You switch between pitching and being at bat, and using the cards in your hand, players and abilities, to try to score as many runs as you can. It's fun. But I like less is the whole being a detective thing, mostly because I never actually got to do it. Any clues you find will be penned to Jack's caseboard, and once you get them there, Jack will just intuit where to go.

You'll work on your part required. What's the point of being a gumshoe if all the answers are handed right to me? That brings me to one of my major problems with Mouse PI for Hire. It began with a call. It's a narrative story, like, it's familiar. That brings me to one of my major problems with MousePI for hire. Look, I hate to be that guy who brings up ludonarrative dissonance in a video game review and- Ludonarrative dissonance, here we go.

Alright, let's hear it. The year of our lord, 2026. And if you're rolling your eyes right now, I can't blame you. But it's an actual issue here. Jack Pepper is a PI who kills more people in a single mission than Philip Marlowe has in every book Raymond Chandler ever wrote combined. I don't care how corrupt the cops are. And he's complaining about allegories and references in his review, meanwhile he makes the most pretentious and annoying allegories and references in his own review to different things. This is crazy.

Oh my god. Private Detective can't break into a police station and slaughter them en masse and then go about his day. In one particularly nonsensical scenario, Jack inadvertently burned a house down in Wait a minute, wait a minute, let me get this straight, let me get this locked in! I was down in an opera house to save a guy running for mayor and he ends up fighting

an opera singer and shoots her?

Is she dead? Did I just kill an actress for being angry I burned down her workplace? If I didn't, have I left her alive and unconscious inside a burning building? OOF AAAAAAAA ... So, this is like, you're actually retarded. And this is the problem with people that are retarded, is that in a lot of cases, they don't know they're retarded.

It creates a lot of problems. Inside of the conversation that you had with the stagehand in this, in this level, he said that there were a lot of random people that were brought in from outside of the normal stage performance, and they were the ones that were suspicious. And you go through the mission fighting them.

So the implication would be that this person would also be that person. Like you're just you're even inside of this like uh self-masturbatory you know film critique ludonarrative language you're still wrong. It doesn't even make sense. He's in a cop mission, he says they aren't real cops, they're goons who took over the police station. I haven't seen that part.

I didn't get that far. Mouse PI for hire doesn't tell me and it doesn't seem to care either way. It did tell you. It did. It told you. it doesn't seem to care either way. None of this is to say that noir cannot or should not be violent, but the violence usually

has a purpose. Much of Elliot Chase's seminal novel Black Wings Has My Angel is about robbing an armored car, but the book builds to that, it's a big deal when it finally happens, and the characters have to reckon with the fallout once it does. Jack Pepper, on the other hand, is a walking catastrophe, and nobody in Mouseburg seems to care. He largely gets to go about his business, and is at best a mass murderer. comment for it because it's just so pretentious and obnoxious that it's impossible to even say

anything about it. Like, for example, the guy's a mass murderer. Well, what do you think Super Mario is? What do you think Sonic the Hedgehog is? What do you think? I mean, the entire premise of this is ridiculous. And also, like, in a lot of noir, I mean, like, there's very commonly people that get shot, and, like, people get killed constantly. They don't give a shit about that. Same with police officers. It's not like he's going into the police station and killing all the people that are actual police officers. They said it's fake police officers. This reviewer is a soy boy

100%. I mean, I don't even know if it's that low. Is it only, is it only 100%? Does that make for a more fun video game? Maybe. But it's bad noir and a worse detective tale. In the story as Mouse PI for higher references, violence is an unfortunate but unavoidable part of the human experience that shatters the people it touches. Here- Oh my- dude, let me go back, we've gotta listen to this again. Oh my god. In the story is mouse PI for higher references, violence is an unfortunate but unavoidable

part of the human experience that sh-

Jesus.

Shatters the people it touches. Here it's just entertainment, and that weakens the whole concept. But will it? Oh my god. Oh my fucking god. This is a goofy Looney Tunes FPS. Why should I care about any of that? And the answer is Oh my fucking god. doing the work. He allegedly needs the money, which both leads him to taking cases and doesn't track when I'm super rich from all the killing.

Nonsense. You're drowning in debt, picking up small fries and petty cases.

All of that makes a lot less sense after you've gone to Tencel Bros Studios and single-handedly eradicated the mob hanging out there, all while doing a bunch of Tomb Raider slash Indiana

Jones slash Conan the Barbarian impressions as everyone says you should be an actor.

So tell us, hero, what is best in life?

To grate some parm, watch the cheese melt, and hear the joyful squeaks of my dinner guests.

Give this guy a week on the job as chief of police and Mouseburg would be the safest city in the world because nobody would be left alive to commit crimes in the first place. It's hard to buy into Jack as the regular guy who needs to gather evidence, I'm told he is, when he just wiped out the local police department.

You know?

But these are like fake cops, right? Like, are these actual the poli- are these the actual police officers, or are these people that took over the police station? They're fake cops. Does it matter? Well, yeah, because it's not even true. Mouse PI for Hire nails the aesthetics of both the 1930s cartoons and the detective

stories that inspired it. It's also an amusing boomer shooter that largely feels good as you're playing it, but its haphazard narrative and noir storytelling tropes and shooter gameplay are often at odds with each other in uncomfortable ways that weaken both aspects, and the writing is so busy making references to other things that it's actually painful to sit through at times. This FPS is solid enough if you just want to blast some cartoon mice and not think about it too hard,

but once you do, all you'll see are the seams where desperate ideas have been fused together, and no trench coat can hide the stink of that holy cheese. For more, check out our reviews of Pragmatoid, and Resident Evil Requiem. And for everything else in gaming, keep it here at IGN. You're not a film reviewer. You don't review films. You don't review movies.

You don't review TV shows. You don't review books. You are reviewing a video game. And if you subtract four points for that video game, for basically ludonarrative dissonance And which by the way, I completely disagree with that I I think it's like you're you're there aren't like a lot of fast travel points. You're driving in the car

You getting killed makes sense. The weapons make sense Uh, the characters being in the area make sense. Like, it's not even true, number one. Number two is that I think maybe this person felt a little bit at risk, you know? Like, because they're the only person that can make completely unnecessary, ridiculous, and completely, like, pretentious illusions and allegories to things that have nothing to do with what's being discussed. You're the only person that can do that.

And so you want to make five or ten of these yourself, and so whenever the game does it, it's bad, but whenever you do it in your review, somehow it's good. This is so annoying. I am so sick of these journalists that think that they're film critics. These are people that basically they want movies and video games to become art. And I'm going to explain the reason why they want that. It's not because they have a higher standard for the medium. It's because they want to improve their own social standing so they can feel like they're more sophisticated and high-minded than they actually are.

You played a video game about a mouse with a machine gun shooting other mice. That's what it is. The problem is that so many of these video games are like, yeah, the story is like, it's a pulp fiction, like not the actual pulp fiction, but like, you know, just the two words put together. Like just retelling of a generic noir 1930s, you know, prohibition style story. Okay, sure, go ahead. The story is a backdrop. It's the memes and the gameplay that matter, right? And that's it. That's what matters. And what I have, he wants to be a real writer. Exactly. Yeah. Like these people don't want video games to become art

and forms of media because they want the genre to become better. They want video games to become forms of art and media so they can cosplay as being this like, uh, you know, high-minded, educated individual. It's so pathetic and embarrassing. I don't even know what to say about it. I really don't. Like, Claire of Hemskyr is unrealistic because the French people fight back. Yeah, right. And, uh, yeah, it's just, it's not that deep. He's forcing it to be deep. It is. And the weirdest thing is that, like, I think they should never have this person review another video game again.

You- if you want to review a video game, go review Mouthwashing, Life is Strange, or another narrative video game. Like, get away from actual video games. Stop giving reviews and giving feedback for an actual video game, just because you want to, uh, have a masturbation session about how much you understand noir media. It's pathetic. It's absolutely pathetic. Like that's what my opinion is. And I think they should be ashamed of themselves giving this game a six. I think it's a seven or an eight game. It is. It was a very well put together game. It was good. Like it'd be be great for dispatch. Yeah, go go review dispatch. That's what I think

Read the comments. I'll link you guys the video the review at the shame Awards needs to be there Yeah, they make money with their reviews Well, I mean like yeah, but people remember this stuff and it's like negative good story good gameplay good ending Yeah, it was a good game. It was definitely good again waiter waiter. My cartoon is too cartoony, bro play This is the kind of guy who thinks mayonnaise is too spicy. I hate to be that guy Proceeds to be that guy. Oh my fucking why is this cartoon mouse game so silly? Yeah, it was a good game. It was definitely good again waiter waiter. My cartoon is too cartoony, bro play This is the kind of guy who thinks mayonnaise is too spicy. I hate to be that guy Proceeds to be that guy. Oh my fucking why is this cartoon mouse game so silly? How fucking embarrassing bro? It's so embarrassing. I don't even know what to say