Might Be the Worst Review I've Ever Seen

Making fun of an IGN review is like breathing. Everyone does it. In fact, you have to do it. It is a biological necessity. And for good reason. IGN reviews will often just find a way to strike the very core of the human soul and force you to foam at the mouth because of how dumb the review is. And it's not intentional rage bait, if it was it'd be far less offensive. It's accidental rage bait from reviewers that... You have to question what the fuck they're on to reach the conclusions they do on certain things.

And it's a topic that's been explored a million times for a million different movies, games, TV shows, what have you. And they get clowned on till the cows come home. I know I've shot spitballs at them a ton but I cannot resist the urge to do it again because this review for Mouse PI for hire. And it's not the score that's so irksome. The IGN grading scale is so fucking cattywampus. It defies conventional wisdom and is an affront to God in and of itself.

So it's not even the score that's bothersome. It's the reasons that the reviewer gives for why it's a 6. It's so outrageous it feels almost satirical except it's done earnestly. It's genuinely fascinating. Like fascinating in the same sense that if I went to the aquarium and a manatee shit into the glass as I was watching it, I'd be like, ooh!

Curious. What? You know, one of those things. It's like, why? How- how did we even get to this point? So, if you subscribe to the gaming channel, Moist Critical Gaming, you've probably already seen that I'm playing this shit out of Mouse PI for Hire. I really like it. I think it's a great game, I'm really enjoying it. Also, you should definitely go subscribe to the gaming channel, I play like a million fucking games a month. But Mouse PI for Hire is a standout so far this year for me. And when I watched the IGN review, I was blown away. So I want to show you some

snippets here. 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 cheese leger.

These cheese legers in on the shrew racket.

Run into a lady mouse with a sultry voice? It'll be described as Gorgonzola picante slapped on her mozzarella platter. 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.

The voice actors led by Troy Baker do an admirable job with what they have, but nothing in Mouseburg is allowed to just be. It has to be a mouse reference or a literally cheesy one liner or a reference to something. So basically he doesn't like that they mention cheese a lot, he doesn't like that it's constantly referencing the fact that they're mice or that it's a video game or other cartoons thinks it's too referential which I actually think is a valid complaint.

He doesn't like the writing. You can boil it down to the writing wasn't tickling him, it didn't make him giggle and he started to roll his eyes at how many times they mentioned cheese. I actually think that's totally fine. The writing isn't going to hit for everybody. There's nothing wrong with that.

But as the review goes on, the complaint becomes more, it wasn't noir the way I wanted it to be, it wasn't serious enough.

And then starts picking out logical inconsistencies with this world.

And that's where things get real fucking goofy. Like that's- that's turbo wacko sauce right there. This game is a love letter to the old rubber hose cartoons and noir. It is not meant to be like a serious fucking pipe smoking noir experience that's gonna have you sitting there thinking in your chair like this hard-boiled detective real big thinker piece or anything like that that the reviewer seems to want it to be. And that's like the main gripe.

He starts pointing out these logical inconsistencies in the world. He does mention the cheese a lot which I think is weird because I think it's a fine complaint to say like I started to get annoyed with all this cheese stuff but it makes sense in the world because these are fucking mice so of course cheese is going to be a big part of like that society in the world they have built. I should probably guess 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 liking foreman Jack will quip that he doesn't look like much of a boss and then laugh at his own joke. Just listen to the way he talks about it. He fucking hated this. I think he wanted to go lower than a 6 but then felt like the response would be too ferocious if he did. It seems like he actually loathed it, just by the way he's talking about it. I don't even understand the complaint about the alligator boss fight. Did he have the same complaint for Resident Evil 2 when you fought a sewer gator there? It actually feels like it's doing the IGN meme of too much water if you remember that

one. This one is too much cheese. Even here though I have issues. Weapons can feel weak, especially the shotgun. It's got the audio 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 mouses head as you paint the white of the world with black ichor that spews from his neck.

I honestly have no idea what this complaint means. I'm not gonna lie. He was going on to compliment the gameplay. It's a boomer shooter, it's a very competent one at that, it's a fun one which he was also mentioning but then said like he also has complaints here and then notes the shotguns sounding a kid's toy and then blowing off bad guys heads in the game It's a cartoon man. What?

Like it sounds like a cartoon shotgun From fucking some kind of WB cartoon back in the day like what? What do you like what is it? What is it supposed to sound like and why does that matter? Like I don't even I truly don't think that was worth mentioning, I really think he was fishing for anything else to critique so that way it seemed like there were more complaints he had outside of just not liking that it

was silly noir instead of serious noir." 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 pull the we're gonna lock you in a room and throw baddies at you until they're dead or you are, shtick. A little too much for my taste.

None of this is game-breaking. 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. Here's another complaint that I think is truly pulled out of his ass just for the sake of trying to find anything else to be negative about to justify a 6. What do you mean that there were too many rooms of just killing enemies to progress?

It's a boomer shooter. You know it's a boomer shooter, you have even made a mention of that. That is the core gameplay loop of a boomer shooter You go into a corridor and you fucking blast ass until there's no one left and then you move forward Did he have the same complaint for doom? I doubt it like because that is what boomer shooters are So I don't know why he's saying there was too much of that here for his taste. Has he never played a boomer shooter? I don't know. It seems like he has because he made a mention

So how could that ever be a complaint if the complaint was the gameplay is not good enough to make me excited for each of these rooms that would be understandable but he made a strong mention that the gameplay is good and is very fun enough to carry you through it so I just don't understand how anyone could have an issue of rooms of enemies you have to kill to move forward in a boomer

shooter when that is the entire meat of that genre. Some of these locks are on 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. ones and then there's going to be more difficult ones with strict things like certain number of moves or you're only allocated a certain number of moves or a certain amount of time. It's a scale. There's easy and then there's hard. Why is that jarring? That's like the most established thing in all of gaming.

He goes on to compliment multiple other things about the game but then says that he never got to do the whole detective thing because the game does it for you and that's another thing that he had an issue with. And that's another thing I think is totally understandable to be like, I'm a little disappointed because the game doesn't make you solve anything. It does do it for you. You gather clues, you put them on the board and it connects the dots, solves it and then you just do the mission.

But I think that's totally fine. The game is a boomer shooter. It is not really a detective game It is a noir aesthetic a love letter to noir It is not putting you as like a detective needing to do like an LA noir style investigation to figure things out It is a boomer shooter at its core. So it doesn't bother me, but I think maybe he's not alone Maybe some other people also wanted to have more like detective elements to it. so that's okay to be a little let down there. I think that's somewhat reasonable, I don't think that's a huge, you know, weird complaint to have there.

But then we get to the section here that made me really want to yap about this because it kind of just blew my mind listening to it. That brings me to one of my major problems with Mouse PI for Hire. Look, I hate to be that guy who brings up ludonarrative dissonance in a video game review 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 Marlowe has in every book Raymond Chandler ever wrote combined.

I don't care how corrupt the cops are, a private detective can't break into a police station and slaughter them en masse and then go about his day. It's actually not a problem here at all, because it's a cartoon. This is supposed to be a cartoon, and one that doesn't take itself seriously, very obviously doesn't take itself seriously, because everything that happens in there is used as a joke or a means of like entertaining you as a cartoon would. Does he have this same complaint with Ed Edd and Eddie? Well, surely they would have broken bones in that scuffle there with that last scam from Edd. This doesn't make any sense. How could they possibly have survived something

like that? Like it's silly. That is a silly complaint. It's not a narrative disconnect because it is a cartoon. And it is very clearly unapologetically leaning into that. So no, it's not actually a problem here, Scrooge. You, the detective, Jack, going around massacring a thousand bad guys and then cooling off at John's with a tall fucking glass of fondue and then playing cards at the table is totally understandable in this setting because it's a cartoon.

In one particularly nonsensical scenario, Jack inadvertently burns 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? Mouse PI4H doesn't tell me, and it doesn't seem to care either way.

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 Mouseburg seems to care. Because it is a cartoon! Why didn't Wile E. Coyote end up in jail for life for being a fucking terrorist blowing up everything? Why did Elmer Fudd not die a million times with everything Bugs Bunny did to him? Why does every cartoon character that have an anvil or grand piano fall on their head like Pepe Le Pew not die right

there? Why do they come back? Because it's a cartoon, man. And this is not supposed to be a serious noir comparable to the actual noir properties that he's referencing. This is more a cartoon than a noir and it's using that aesthetic blending both of them together and I think it does it extremely well. It's such a weird complaint like I really think this is just so odd. Again the score isn't even that bothersome to me because I'm sure people have played this

and they're like it's not really for me the writing you know doesn't make me laugh and I don't love the shooting and you know it's the same enemies are repeated tons of times It's not like there's a ton of enemy variety And it doesn't really challenge you to be switching weapons constantly like other boomer shooters So you know maybe I'd give it a six I could understand that and I'm sure there are people that have that take That's not the issue

the

reason why this review is getting dunked on by a lot of people and now I'm yapping about it so much is because the reason that he's giving for it being a 6 is solely because it seems he just really wanted to be a serious noir and the fact that it's silly and plays by cartoon rules instead of noir rules bothered him so much that it knocks it all the way to a 6 despite everything else being good like all of the actual gameplay which he makes a mention of. It's just odd, it's so weird. 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. Does that make for a more fun video game? Maybe. But it's bad noir and a worse detective tale. There's no maybe there, it does make for a better game when the game is supposed to be entirely revolving around boomer shooter action. That is the main meat here. And no it doesn't make it a bad detective game because very few people are going to

be looking at it through this lens of, ruined my immersion in the mouse world here because Jack killed so many bad guys and he didn't go to jail and no one even really seemed to care about all of that? And the answer is because Mouse wants you to. It wants you to believe that 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. Oh my god, it's like it's the first video game he's ever played. He is now using the fact that you collect currency when you kill the bad guys as a way of saying now this story doesn't make sense because I'm no longer down on my luck, I got so much money, I'm rich, look at my inventory.

Brother what? dreadfully misunderstood the game if he thinks that it's taking itself seriously. At no point throughout the 10 hours I've spent with it so far, has I- have I even had a whiff, the slightest huff, of something that's supposed to be taken seriously as like an emotional beat. Because at every step of the way, even during like a big reveal and like a big betrayal of someone that we looked up to, it is used as slapstick comedy when you actually get there and confront them. It is always being silly

because that's what cartoons do. Well at least the cartoons that this is paying homage to. And like he mentions it tries to get you invested because you spend a lot of time with them. Yeah man that's because that's called a good game that has a lot to do you get to interact with the characters You get to talk to them you get to learn about them, and that's fun, and it's always entertaining camaraderie between them But that doesn't mean that it needs to be taken to the utmost level of seriousness

Like in the noir properties that you're referencing because that's not what it goes for. And I don't know how he could possibly get that impression when he was playing it. I really don't know. I don't get it." Mouse PI for Hire nails the aesthetics of both the 1930s cartoons and the detective stories that inspired it. It's also an amusing boomer shooter that largely feels good as you're playing it. But its haphazard marriage of 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 seams where disparate ideas have been fused together, and no trench coat can hide the stink of that pulpy cheese. The only stink here is this review. It is so silly. Again, the score is not the problem. I'm sure there's plenty of people that played this and find it to be like a 6. Cause maybe they got tired of fighting the same enemies a lot. Or like I said, maybe the writing just didn't hit for them either. And his complaint of like, too much cheese, not enough substance, I didn't like the writing I wasn't laughing I think is fine but that's like the only actual complaint here the rest I just

think is baloney too many rooms we have to kill all the enemies to progress it's a fucking boomer shooter how could that possibly be a complaint you could just say like you don't like boomer shooters then in that case but that's not even the impression I got from his review it seems like he likes boomer shooters than in that case but that's not even the impression I got from his review it seems like he likes boomer shooters so how how would you ever have this complaint in that case and then like the other things are it's not logical how could how could Jack be a hero detective when he's killed all of

these people and no one takes that seriously all this death it doesn't make sense it's like it's a cartoon or something it's ridiculous. Anyway, I'll stop blabbering about it. This review was just Wild I I had to talk about it a bit more I was talking about it a bit last night on stream when I was Going through the IGN review before playing some more mouse PI for hire and it was just it was something man Going through the IGN review before playing some more mouse PI for hire and it was just it was something man It really was so anyway, that's really about it. See ya