Animation fans, rejoice: the 1930s cartoon Dizzy Dishes has entered the public domain this year. What’s notable about Dizzy Dishes is that it featured the original Betty Boop—that is, as a lady poodle, rather than the very human jazz singer/flapper we know today. Boop, however, doesn’t take center stage in this clip; instead, Dizzy Dishes features her mongrel boyfriend Bimbo, as he dances and prepares a meal for an impatient patron at his restaurant, his arms undulating and rubbery. He then struts to the stage where Boop’s performing, dazzled by her sultry performance. There he picks up his dish, stretches it into a guitar and strums, before breaking into an effortless jig. Every movement is lithe and velvety smooth, with objects pulled and tugged at till they wriggle into life.
Of course, Dizzy Dishes isn’t the only animated clip of the black and white cartoon era to have entered the public domain. A more well-known example would be Steamboat Willie, which is the first animated film that the prodigious rodent, Mickey Mouse, appeared in. Perhaps seizing advantage of the expired copyright, developer Fumi Games crafted P.I. For Hire in the vein of the iconic film and cartoons like Dizzy Dishes, complete with a film noir city of rodent denizens who bear more than just a passing resemblance to classic Mickey and Minnie. The signs are all there: the white gloves, the round black ears, the rubber hose animation. And at the center of the action is the private investigator Jack Pepper, a trenchcoat wearing, cigar-smoking, and gravelly-voiced mouse. When a magician seemed to have suddenly vanished into thin air, Pepper found himself inadvertently untangling an intricate web of corruption at the heart of the city Mouseberg.
Impeccable style
If you wish to know how well P.I. For Hire has nailed this style down, just look at the details. Frogs and flowers in the background are constantly swaying to a bebop tune. The barrels of Pepper’s guns bend and wobble with barely contained glee. Batons wielded by the city’s corrupt cops stretch and flop as they wallop Pepper. And true to the spirit of both film noir and 1930s-era cartoons, the whole game is rendered in black and white; there’s none of that technicolour nonsense of the later years (if you like, you can even add a grainy or vintage filter to age the animation). P.I. For Hire oozes style in buckets, from the reload animations to the resplendently gory death scenes. Nail a headshot and the enemy’s head splatters, exposing the stem of their neck. Set them on fire and they turn into smouldering ash and a pair of eyes that stare back morosely. Accentuating the cacophony of these scenes is the original jazz soundtrack, which makes its frenetic shootouts particularly exhilarating. P.I. For Hire is a game that banks on and draws heavily from this golden age of cartoons, and it succeeds in being a particularly charming tribute to this era.
As a shooter, P.I. For Hire offers a modest arsenal of weapons, each with their own delightful quirks. You’re initially handed a pistol known as the micer, a cheeky reference to the Mauser C96, to dispatch the first few waves of goons. At first I was surprised by the lack of heft to the very act of shooting itself—there’s very little feedback, recoil, or impact, so gunfights can feel a tad hollow. At the same time, you can’t look down any sights, so this is pretty much limited to pointing and clicking at moving targets. That said, enemies scramble by quickly and you’re very much incentivized to keep moving without taking cover or staying at a single spot, while dodging a rain of speeding bullets. Eventually, you’ll unlock more weapons as you move through the game’s levels, such as the Boomstick, the James Gun (a cleverly named Tommy gun), dynamite, and the Devarnisher, which changes up the cadence of these skirmishes and lets you blaze down opponents in your own way. My personal favourite would be the Devarnisher, a turpentine-powered gun that spits out blobs of acid, which slows enemies down while pulverizing them into crumbling skeletons.
And while the goons of Mouseberg – cops, cultists, mafias – may be exquisitely drawn, they generally fall into the cookie-cutter moulds of skinny dudes with sticks, big dudes with guns (with significantly more health), and flying dudes with propellers and bombs. In other words, the recurring gunfights tend to feel familiar after a while, and once you’ve stepped into an arena with health potions and bullets strewn about the vicinity, a shootout is imminent. That’s not a problem distinct to P.I. For Hire, of course, but it’s an issue it inherited from the shooters it took ample inspiration from.
Not so mousey
The game’s boss fights are where the combat shines. A laser-shooting robot forces you to run and jump as you seek to steady your aim against her. Another is a formidable crocodile foe with an oversized machine gun, with an army of baby crocs that would chomp away at your feet. Then there’s a cowardly mouse that hurtles around on a speed boat, as you attempt to stay above water – while still shooting at him – by leaping across several pontoons. These fights force you to incorporate the sum of your abilities, including dashing, double jumping, and even gliding, to get an edge over the enemy, and these constant movements are unrelentingly thrilling.
Outside of these gunfights, there are a few activities to busy yourself with. Gun schematics can be hoarded for upgrading your weapons, usually found locked behind safes that flounder with unbridled energy. This is a lock-picking minigame in which Pepper directs his tail through a keyhole; some safes even have to be unlocked within a limited number of moves and time. Several collectibles, such as newspapers, comic strips, baseball cards, and Funko figurines of Pepper himself, can be found in discrete corners. Most of them are just peculiar paraphernalia and additional bits of lore to pick at, but the cards will become part of a deck you can play a baseball card game with when you’re back at your office, serving as a bit of a fun distraction in between investigations. The sleuthing itself, however, is a bit of a dud; clues can be collected, but detective work pretty much just amounts to pinning them up on your investigation wall and seeing how these tie in together. These are good for recalling key plot points, but you won’t be doing much deduction; Pepper mostly monologues his way into insights while staring at the wall.
Skin deep
Then there’s the mystery itself, which is a pretty standard noir tale, populated by characters who are literal archetypes to the point of caricature: the femme fatale, the inquisitive journalist, the hired killer, the dirty cop and last but not least, the hard-boiled detective. I do wish that P.I. For Hire had done more than just impart the typical noir tale of corrupt cops and moral decay in the city; L.A. Noire, for instance, immediately came to mind with the way it tells a compelling anti-war story. In this aspect, P.I. For Hire can feel like experiencing a series of museum exhibits, filled with ostensibly lifelike, but ultimately shallow, anthropomorphic rats moving around on stilts. Look around the characters and you’ll realize that they are merely cardboard cutouts (one rodent even pointed out that they are 2D characters living in a 3D reality). There’s no depth nor subversions here.
That’s perhaps the biggest issue with P.I. For Hire; for all its polish and bombast, it’s ultimately a pastiche of its influences: 1930s-era cartoons, film noir and FPSes. This isn’t a game that will break new ground, even though it’s exceedingly great at what it sets out to achieve as an adrenaline-fuelled shooter that’s thick with retro, old school vibes. Self-assured and visually rousing, P.I. For Hire doesn’t try to reimagine the genre; instead leaning hard into its striking good looks. And who knows, perhaps poodle Betty Boop will make an appearance one day in a DLC, too.
