This reviewer should never touch another video game..

So, Mouse PI for Hire got a review from IGN and it was um not wellreceived. Let's find out why. Let's find out. I love noir. I'll take all kinds. The hard-boiled detective, the city crime story, neon noir, classic pulp. You name it, I'm buying. Okay. Okay. So when mouse pi for hire sauntered onto my screen the way Elsa walks into Ricks in Casablanca, I was pretty see I can already tell this is a theater kid like using these illusions and allegorories. Only a kid that was in AP English in 12th grade would do that. I mean not a like an incredible author and writer would never do this, but somebody who was in AP English, they definitely would. I can I can immediately tell 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 pi 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 detected mystery with a fast retrostyled 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 and 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 toward the dream. A bright future ruled by big mouse follows a private eye in a world where everyone is a mouse after Wanda Fuller from the Mouseberg Herald sets him on the case of a missing magician. I can give you more than a crumbjack. 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-mouse violence as bigger oppress the smaller shrews. My buddy got nabbed for just being a shrew. Same as a what is shrew? Never mind. Was even in Mouseberg. And the requisite twists and turns you'd expect from any good detective story make this tale solid enough. I was in too deep. Way deeper than I signed up for. 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 cheeseleer. These cheese leggers in on the shrew record. Run into a lady mouse with a sultry voice. It'll be described as Gorgon's old beante slapped on a mozzarella platter. Someone need to assure you they're telling the truth. Swear on my mama's cottage curds. 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. When you jump, just act like you didn't. I should have probably guessed the former when one of the first things I saw was a steamboat named Willie, 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 cheese like Well, yeah. I mean, where would 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 are we on that level now? Are we in this situation? He's upset about an alligator. Damn. All right. Jesus. Informant Jack will quip that he doesn't look like much of a boss. More like a mini 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 Mousberg is allowed to just be. It has to be a mouse reference or a literally cheesy oneliner. Shedd, what's wrong with GA? No ga if you're broke, Jack. Or a reference to something else. Tickets seller. I'm going on a perilous journey, so I need your strongest tickets. It's hard to care about anything in mouse pi for hire because it never stops making jokes about everything. Here's Jacko. It just wants to remind you of other better things. Surely. Is this the most Reddit review that you've ever seen? And 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 it it this is just crazy. Like he's just saying [ __ ] I know. He's just saying [ __ ] That's enough. Right time to find someone higher up. See, here's the big problem that a lot of games reviewers have. Everything that you've been talking about is [ __ ] and nobody cares about it. You have spent onethird of the review complaining about references to cheese. 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 talk 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 Nothing. This has nothing to do with the actual video game. It's just [ __ ] At least the shooting is better. This is the latest in a wave of boomer shooters inspired by old school FPS's like Quake, and it's a decent one at that. You start with a pistol and 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 enemy's bones, leaving only a skeleton. Duh. 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. You're not telling me that you're going to tell me the world building and the gameplay and the graphics and everything are good, but you're going to give it a low score because they said cheese too many times. Like there's no way this happened, right? There's no way. May be thin, but mouse pi for hire is still dressed to the nines. Even here though, I have issues. Weapons can feel weak, especially the shotgun. It's got the audio. What? 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 sound effect for the shotgun the world with black ices 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 which is how many of you guys whenever you were a kid, you could recognize the guy's going to come out of that barrel because that barrel is animated 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. Stick. A little too much for my taste. None of this is gamebreaking. 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, kinatics, baseball cards, and so on. Fragile walls to blow up, and even lock 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. Uh-huh. 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 I don't even know what to say. My favorite thing here is the baseball card miniame you can play at the bar 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. What 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 pinned to Jack's caseboard. And once you get them there, Jack will just in it where to go. No work on your part required. What's the point of being a gum shoe if all the answers are handed right to me? Better check it out. It began with a call routine. It's a narrative story like it familiar. That brings me to one of my major problems with Mouse PI for hire. Look, I hate to be that guy who brings up lud narrative dissonance in a video game review. Ludo narrative dissonance. Here we go. All right, let's hear it. in 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 Marlo has in every book Raymond Chandler ever wrote combined. I don't care how corrupt the cops are. And he's complaining about allegorories and references in his review. Meanwhile, he makes the most pretentious and annoying allegorories 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 on mass and then go about his day. In one particularly nonsensical scenario, Jack inadvertently Wait a minute. Are you telling me that it's unrealistic that the mouse with a gun stopped the cannon from killing the mailor candidate with a chandelier? Are you telling me that that didn't happen? Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Let me let me get this straight. Let me get this locked in. Down 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? So, this is like you're actually [ __ ] And this is the problem with people that are [ __ ] is that in a lot of cases they don't know they're [ __ ] It creates a lot of problems inside of the conversation that you had with the stage hand in this in in this this level. He said that there were a lot of random people that were brought in from outside of the uh 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 you're just you're it even inside of this like uh self-masturbatory, you know, film critique ludo narrative language, you're still wrong. It doesn't even make sense. Still it'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 did tell you whenever the stage person it said that. Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown. 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 Mouseberg seems to care. He largely gets to go about his business and is portrayed as a down on his luck, everyman PI, like the characters who inspired him, when he is at best a mass murderer. You This is the dumbest [ __ ] I've ever heard. Like I I in a lot of this I don't even really have a 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? Like 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 [ __ ] 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%. Applying something, Mr. Pepper? Me? Imply? Never. I just connect the dots. Does that make for a more fun video game? Maybe. But it's bad noir and a worse detective tale in the Do you think you're going to get Sin City out of out of Mickey Mouse gets a gun and goes to 1930s [ __ ] New York? Really? Whose review is he watching? A retards. The story is 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 got to listen to this again. Oh my god. In the story as Mouse PI for higher references, violence is an unfortunate experience that Jesus shatters the people it touches. Here it's just entertainment and that weakens the whole concept. But will Oh my [ __ ] god. You might say, "This is a goofy Looney Tunes FPS. Why should I care about any of that?" And the answer is because Mouse wants you to. It wants you to believe this is important. You spend a lot of time talking about these characters, about putting together the clues you need to get to the bottom of what's going on, about Jack's motivation for 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/ Indiana Jones/ 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 in Mouseberg 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 are these the actual police officers or are these people that took over the police station? They're fake cops. Uh does it matter? Well, yeah, because it's not even true. We're sure big on this one. Mouse PI for Hire nails the aesthetics of both the 1930s cartoons and the detective stories that inspired it and it's also an amusing boomer shooter that largely feels good as you're playing it, but it's halfhazard. The game's good. Okay. 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 scenes where desperate ideas have been fused together. And no trench coat can hide the stink of that moldy cheese. For more, check out our reviews of Pragmat. Just a moment. Let me let me go back. I'm going to explain something maybe this person might not be aware of. And Resident Evil Reququum. 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're reviewing a video game. And if you subtract four points for that video game for basically ludo narrative dissonance and which by the way I completely disagree with that. I I think it 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 uh illusions and allegorories 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 10 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 it's a pulp fiction. Like not the actual pulp fiction, but like you know, just the two words put together. um 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 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 cleric obscure is unrealistic because the French people fight back. Yeah, right. And uh yeah, it it's just it's not that deep, but 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. 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 It was good. Like, uh, it' be great for Dispatch. Yeah. Go review Dispatch. That 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 It was definitely a good game. Waiter, waiter, my cartoon is too cartoony. Bro definitely needs a glass of water to wash down the water. I'll take all kinds of noir, unless it's not my kind. The best thing about this review are the comments. Plays a mouse game. Mad at the amount of cheese references. The studio didn't pay us. Six out of 10. 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 [ __ ] Why is this cartoon mouse game so silly? HOW [ __ ] EMBARRASSING, BRO? IT'S SO EMBARRASSING.