Cuphead was something I’ve never seen before in video games in 2017, or at least not near Cuphead. I built the entire game around completely hand-drawn art and animation with 1930s cartoons. Doing all the painstaking visual tasks with your hands is extremely difficult, time-based and troublesome, so you probably haven’t seen them before. But now, a new, hand-drawn, hand-animated project is ready to decorate your PC and console. It is called the mouse: PI for Hire, and fully handmade art, it is the only thing it has in common with Cuphead. The Mouse is a unique, equally gorgeous game, and after watching the handoff demo, I’m just as interested as when I first saw the Cuphead. In other words, I’m very interested.
As you can clearly see, the mouse is black and white. It reminds me of the early animated steamship’s will era, perfect with a gun that always wobbles, even when not in use, like rubber. (A little bit about guns.) As you can clearly see, Mouse is a first-person shooter. In it, you play as Jack Pepper. Jack Pepper will be performed by highly sought-after video game voice actor Troy Baker with a typical target New York accent. He is an early 20th century gum show. He has to sound like that.
What I really liked about the demo I saw with Mouse was that it wasn’t just a first-person shooter with unconscious running and guns (not that there’s a problem with that). Instead, the mission I saw was set up in the Opera House. There, Pepper had to find a stage designer and ask questions. We started with the backdoor. So I spoke to the waiter and asked about Roland, the aforementioned stage designer. He doesn’t see him, so we go for an investigation for ourselves.
Inside, the kitchen gives you a good look at the visual aesthetics playing around with here. Unlike the original Destiny Monster, note how the characters are 2D within 3D space. A peer into the porthole window in the kitchen door, you can see one of the features of the Mouse Detective. Because Jack takes a photo and looks at the members of a massive Mouse Party.
Move back to the back of the kitchen and meet a smooth waiter who will help us sneak up on where we need to go quietly. We refuse to bribe and find a vent that we can sneak up on instead. The cash bonus stash hidden in the vent is appreciated, but it’s not so appreciated that it fell off the vent and crashed us outside where we started.
Try No. 2 and you go through the kitchen, return to the same vent, carefully raw through the newly created holes in the floor, and take you to the dressing room where Thompson’s machine gun and ammunition are waiting. Of course, you are not supposed to be here, and members of the big mouse party should not be kind to your presence. Let’s take a first-person shooter battle, including one of the gorgeous reload animations.
We hear muffled voices that may be Roland, but first the safe gives us the opportunity to see the lock picking mini-game running. Then the wall in front of us explodes and things really get loud as we have to sniff out the bad guys coming out of the smoke before we can use the TNT to drill holes in the floor.
Finally, I found Roland. He is beaten by extras, speculating that Jack is not an extra, and learns the real plans for the Big Mouth Party. To assassinate mayoral candidate Stilton, sitting on the balcony for that night’s show, he uses cannons on stage full of live ammos and pointed directly at him.
Fast forward to more combat including Shotgun. The shotgun looks like it’s packed with a nice wallop. It also has its own very nice reload animation. Plus, let’s take a look at the explosive barrels where the bad guys are burning in the most cartoonish way possible. There’s even an ice barrel – liquid nitrogen, perhaps? – It will freeze nearby enemies when exploded, allowing them to kick them, and will be crushed into Terminator 2 style. A while later I also saw the third weapon featured in the demo: the Turpentine Gun. Does TurepentineGun melt these cartoon characters, literally made of paint, unlike the dip from Roger Rabbit’s frame?
After fighting a bit of platform and a new helicopter tail enemy type, we returned upstairs. The trap door opened under my feet and I returned to the basement. Here we meet an old rat stuntman teaching Jack the Double Jump Maneuver. After testing it and discovering the secret – “Bree” Ruth’s baseball trading card (you get it because it’s a mouse and loves cheese?) – we’re back on stage to save Stilton, who thwarts the cannon and causes a boss fight with the raging opera performer. Turpentine gun finishes him and let’s take a look at its reload animation.
The fire from the stage spreads to the rest of the opera house and must leave. But we must use all our weapons at our disposal to get out. Jack Pepper is fine. Now let’s take a look at some battles.
Finally, we run away from the building and meet the stage designer. The stage designer coughs at what he knows about the performer he disappeared. Something about the secret lab under his mansion? No, it doesn’t sound suspicious at all…and then we finish the level and the demo ends.
So, I haven’t played it myself yet, but from what I saw with the mouse – you’ve just seen most of what I saw – I’m really eager to give it a try. It seems to have the right, easy-going, somewhat comedic tone while providing a solid first-person shooter game at its core. After all, it’s just as gorgeous and admirable as its hand-drawn art and animation, if the gameplay can’t back it up and keep my interest in the course of the campaign, it really doesn’t matter how pretty it is. But at this point I am very optimistic.
Ryan McCaffrey is the executive editor of Passthecontroller previews and is a host of both Passthecontroller’s Weekly Xbox Show. Unlock podcastsand our monthly (-ish) interview show, Passthecontroller is not filtered. He’s a North Jersey guy, so he’s “Taylorham” rather than “pork roll.” Discuss it with him on Twitter @dmc_ryan.
