Cuphead did something in 2017 that we’d arguably never seen before in a video game, or at least nowhere near the degree Cuphead went to: it built an entire game around completely hand-drawn art and animation a la a 1930’s cartoon. We haven’t seen it since probably since doing all of that painstaking visual work by hand is incredibly difficult, time-intensive, and laborious. But now, a new hand-drawn and hand-animated project is getting ready to grace our PCs and consoles. It’s called Mouse: P.I. for Hire, and fully handcrafted art is about the only thing it’s got in common with Cuphead. Mouse is its own, equally gorgeous game, and after getting a look at a hands-off demo, I’m just as interested in it as I was when I first saw Cuphead. Which is to say, I’m very interested.
As you can obviously see, Mouse is in black and white. It’s reminiscent of the Steamboat Willy era of early animation, complete with guns that are always wobbling even when they aren’t in use, as if they’re made of rubber. (More on the guns in a bit.) As you can also plainly see, Mouse is a first-person shooter. In it, you play as Jack Pepper, who in-demand video game voice actor Troy Baker plays with a stereotypical-on-purpose New York accent. He’s an early-20th-century gumshoe, after all, see? He’s got to sound like one.
What I really liked about the demo I saw of Mouse was that it wasn’t just a mindless run-and-gun first-person shooter (not that there’s anything wrong with that). Instead, the mission I saw part of was set at an opera house, where Pepper had to find and question the stage designer. We started at the back door, where we spoke to a waiter and asked about Roland, the aforementioned stage designer. He hasn’t seen him, so in we go to investigate for ourselves.
Inside, the kitchen gives you a better look at the visual aesthetic at play here. Notice how the characters are 2D within the 3D space, not unlike the monsters in the original Doom. A peek through the porthole window of the kitchen door shows off one of Mouse’s detective-y features: reconnaissance, as Jack takes a photo and sees some members of the Big Mouse Party – aka not guys we want anything to do with.
Moving to the back of the kitchen, we meet up with a slick waiter who’s happy to help sneak us upstairs to where we need to go quietly – for $30. We decline the bribe and instead find a vent we can sneak through. A bonus stash of cash hiding in the vent is appreciated, but the bottom falling out of the vent, crash-landing us back outside where we started, is very much not appreciated.
Attempt number two takes us back through the kitchen and into the same vent, carefully crawling around the newly made hole in the floor and taking us to the dressing room, where a Thompson machine gun and some ammo await. You’re not supposed to be in here, of course, and the Big Mouse Party members don’t take kindly to your presence. It’s here that we get our first look at the first-person shooter combat, including one of the gorgeous reload animations.
We hear a muffled voice that might be Roland, but first a safe gives us a chance to see the lockpicking minigame in action, along with what the safe was hiding: a cup of coffee? Then things get really loud, as the wall in front of us blows up and we have to snuff out the bad guy that emerges from the smoke before using TNT ourselves to make a hole in the floor so we can make our way down into the bowels of the opera house.
Finally, we’ve found Roland. He’s been beaten up by the extras, who Jack deduces aren’t extras at all, and learns the Big Mouse Party’s real plan: to assassinate mayoral candidate Stilton, who’s sitting in the balcony for that evening’s show, during intermission, using the cannon on stage that is both full of live ammo and pointed directly at him.
Fast-forward to more combat, including the shotgun, which looks like it packs a nice wallop – and also has a pretty awesome reload animation of its own. Plus a look at explosive barrels that leave the bad guys burning in the most cartoonish way possible. There’s even an ice barrel – liquid nitrogen, perhaps? – that freezes nearby foes when detonated, allowing you to kick them so they shatter into a thousand pieces, Terminator 2-style. Moments later we also got a look at the third weapon featured in the demo: the turpentine gun, which melts these cartoon characters who are literally made of paint, not unlike the Dip from Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
After a bit of platforming and fighting a new helicopter-tailed enemy type, we found our way back upstairs…only to have a trap door below our feet open up, dumping us back into the basement. It’s here we meet the Old Rat Stuntman, who teaches Jack the double-jump maneuver. After testing it out and discovering a secret – a baseball trading card of “Brie” Ruth (get it, because they’re mice and love cheese?) – we find our way back on stage to sabotage the cannon and save Stilton, which triggers a boss battle with a raging opera performer. The turpentine gun finishes him off, and we get a look at its reload animation, which if you ask me is even cooler than the others we’ve already seen.
The fire from the stage has spread to the rest of the opera house, and we’ve gotta get out of here. But we’re going to have to shoot our way out using every weapon at our disposal. No problem for Jack Pepper. Let’s watch some combat now, uninterrupted.
Finally escaping the building, we meet up with the stage designer, who coughs up what he knows about the performer who’s vanished. Something about a secret lab underneath his mansion? No, that doesn’t sound suspicious at all… And with that, we exit the level and the demo ends.
And so, though I haven’t yet played it myself, from what I’ve seen of Mouse – and you just saw most of what I saw – I’m really eager to give it a try. It seems like it’s got the right lighthearted, somewhat comedic tone while also being self-aware but offering a solid first-person shooter at the core of it. After all, as gorgeous and admirable as its hand-drawn art and animation are, if the gameplay can’t back it up and also maintain my interest in it over the course of its campaign, then it won’t really matter how pretty it is. But at this point, I’m extremely optimistic.
Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s executive editor of previews and host of both IGN’s weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, as well as our monthly(-ish) interview show, IGN Unfiltered. He’s a North Jersey guy, so it’s “Taylor ham,” not “pork roll.” Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.
