MOUSE: P.I. For Hire review for PC, PS5, Xbox Series X, Nintendo Switch

I have a hard time imagining a world where I didn’t love MOUSE: P.I. For Hire.

While I wouldn’t say I know much – or anything – about 1930s cartoons, I’m a huge fan of 1930s movies with a soft spot for noir, and I love jazz from the era. Give me a fan that’s unabashedly a love letter to that era, and I’m sold without even having a chance to play the game.

And now that I’ve played it, I somehow love it even more. On a certain level, it’s just a straightforward first-person shooter – you run around the game’s stylized world blasting away enemies, picking up loot, and doing all the usual things you’d expect. It’s the sort of game where pretty much everything feels like second nature because you’ll have done so much of it before.

And yet, you haven’t quite played it like this before. You can drop anvils on enemies. You can shoot explosive barrels and see the enemies settle into little piles of ash on the floor. If you just plain shoot them, they do that old-timey cartoon thing where they go stiff as a board and fall down. Obviously we didn’t have video games 90 years ago, but if we had, it’s easy to imagine that they would’ve played like this, using the cartoon-world logic of the time and applying it to a boomer shooter.

But at the same time, the gameplay almost seems like a secondary reason for why MOUSE: P.I. For Hire is so delightful. The visuals, obviously, are the big draw here. The game describes itself as inspired by the “rubber hose animation” of the 1930s, and it really feels like you’re walking through a world that’s not far off from Steamboat Willie or early Mickey Mouse. The whole time I was playing the game, I wanted to stop and just take everything in because it was so perfectly imagined.

And on top of that, the game nails the noirish vibe it’s going for to perfection. The voiceover work by Troy Baker as Private Investigator Jack Pepper is a spot-on homage to hard-boiled detective novels and film noir from the 1940s, and everyone you come across looks and talks like a mouse-ified version of a noir archetype. Add in jazzy soundtrack that’s smoky and sultry and everything else it needs to be, and you can see why it’s so easy to love the game.

But what cinches it has to be that MOUSE: P.I. For Hire is, indeed, a fantastic game. The world is well-imagined and the aesthetics are perfection, but the fact they’re all built around an absurdly fun first-person shooter makes this a game you absolutely need to play.

PlaySide provided us with a MOUSE: P.I. For Hire PC code for review purposes.