Mouse: P.I. for Hireshowed up atSummer Game Festwith a brief trailer full of rodent revolver action. I’ve been following the game on Twitter for years, and have been consistently amazed by the clips its developer shares and how closely it manages to match the look of rubber hose animation within the framework of a 3D first-person shooter.
For the uninitiated, he trailer did a great job of showing this off, alternating between animated shots of a newscaster speaking into an old-timey radio mic, and first-person gameplay following the titular great mouse detective, Jack Pepper, as he blasted his way through Mouseburg with an array of weapons, gorgeously animated in black-and-white.
The trailer’s biggest piece of news was that Troy Baker is voicing Jack Pepper.
Mouse: P.I. for Hire struck a chord with me the first time I saw it for the same reasons Cuphead did the first time I caught a glimpse of it at an Xbox showcase. Cuphead, however, did not strike a chord with me the first time Iplayedit.
Boss battles have never been my favorite part of any game, andCupheadwas almost entirely built around these encounters. These fights gave Studio MDHR the opportunity to do incredible work bringing a slew of expressive, screen-filling enemies to life, but I always enjoyed looking at the game more than attempting to push through its tough skill checks.
This can be an issue with gorgeous games; sometimes the gameplay just can’t live up to the aesthetic. For example, I enjoyedHarold Halibutbut it was an incredibly basic adventure game underneath the incredible stop-motion coat of paint. Harold Halibut is easier to enjoy than Cuphead because it’s an easier game, but the point remains the same. Some games are gorgeous enough for it to be the focus. Complex gameplay wasn’t what brought anyone to Harold Halibut, and that’s okay.
But it does leave room for improvement. In fact, at Summer Game Fest, there was a trailer for a new game that, like Harold Halibut, was made using physical models. The trailer for Out of Words interspersed clips of its co-op gameplay with shots of its developers' hands, positioning the characters. Cohost Lucy James referred to it as “a stop-motion co-op platformer where everything has been crafted by hand,” just like Harold Halibut. But from a gameplay perspective, it looks like it’s doing a whole lot more.
Though Harold Halibut’s compositions were often uniquely beautiful in a way I imagine will be difficult to top.
Standing On The Shoulders Of Giants
This is what Mouse: P.I. for Hire is doing with the rubber hose animation Cuphead used to such great effect. It’s taking that look and putting it in a boomer shooter, a genre that is much more popular with modern audiences than run-and-gun Contra-style shoot-em-ups. Mouse looks way better than Cuphead. But, it also couldn’t exist without it. Harold Halibut and Cuphead walked so that Out of Words and Mouse: P.I. for Hire could run.
That isn’t a bad thing. In fact, that’s the 50-plus-year story of video games in a nutshell. WhenDoomtook the gaming world by storm in the early ’90s, it resulted in every new FPS that followed being referred to as a ‘Doom clone.’ In the early ’00s, publishers searched for a ‘Halokiller,’ a console shooter that could rocket them to Bungie-level success. And in the late ’10s,PUBGset off the race for a battle royale, inspiringFortnite’s own wildly popular mode.
The games that made these genres mainstream might be your favorites, but they aren’t always. Many players preferHalf-Lifeto Doom,Call of Dutyto Halo, andApex Legendsto PUBG. Every new work of art stands on the shoulders of giants. It’s just that, in Mouse’s case, it’s standing on the shoulders of two anthropomorphic cups.
