With the rapid development of technology, game developers have become more and more realistic about the engraving of the picture: smart hair can see the skin details of pores, and almost real light and shadow effects… Almost every month, new technology patents appear, the purpose is to be closer to the real 3D world.
However, a ‘detective mouse’ did the opposite, not relying on any realistic firearm modeling, and even the enemy was a plane, the whole game was like watching a hand-painted rubber tube animation of the 1930s. Such a seemingly ‘old out’ art style and design, but after its launch on April 16, 3,378 evaluations (data until 12:00 on April 20) have reached rave reviews.
What’s more dramatic is that a game with such results has only got 6 points of ‘Shang Ke’ in IGN’s evaluation.
It is rare to see such a disparity in the media evaluation of a game. Is this a single media judgment mistake, or is it the structural dilemma of the evaluation system itself? To answer this question, you need to first understand what kind of game this is, and why it is naturally easy to trigger a disagreement in the evaluation.
Today, let’s talk about ‘Detective Jack Mouse’.
01
Black and white, or color?
Fumi Games, the developer of ‘Detective Jack Mouse’, is from Warsaw, Poland, and the publisher is Australia’s Playside Studios. The starting point of the team is extremely small, with only 5 people at first.
The game is not a product of a business plan, but a personal project carried out by Michal Rostek, the director of art and the chief animator, in his spare time. It is worth mentioning that Fumi Games was originally an animation studio and transformed into game development due to the cancellation of a large number of contracts in the Poland animation industry during the Covid-19 epidemic. This foundation has established the team’s outstanding ability in hand-painted animation.
The real turning point comes from the spread of an unintentional willow. The programmer posted a behind-the-scenes video on TikTok, which was unexpectedly popular, attracting the attention of a large number of players around the world.
Michal Rostek at IGN A dramatic story was recalled in the first interview: I met a friend on the subway on the way to work, and a friend told him that ‘I saw an article on the game website, someone was making a game, very much like the kind you want to do.’
And that game is the ‘Detective Jack Mouse’ he is doing himself.
Perhaps it is precisely because of this peculiar communication path that it has laid the player foundation for ‘Detective Jack Mouse’. They did not rely on large-scale marketing and promotion, and used the unique art expression of this game to attract many people to stop and watch, and they have grown a group of players who are willing to expect. This also paved the way for the polarization of subsequent commercial game media and player evaluations.
In the development process, the team has faced a critical artistic direction decision: should it be colored?
At that time, there were many voices in the community who believed that ‘it’s very creative, but you should make color.’ The change has made people accustomed to a world full of color. This black and white style that was even popular a hundred years ago has been labeled as ‘niche’ and ‘unpopular’ when dealing with it. It is difficult to retain the basic disk.
But Mateusz Mithalak and the team, CEO and founder of Fumi Games, have never been shaken. ‘We never thought of adding any color,’ Michalak said frankly during the IGN First interview.
For Fumi Games, the main source of inspiration is the style of the rubber tube animation itself. Among them, the deepest influence is to create many excellent characters, such as Miss Betty and Popeye Fleischer Studios.
The classic IP miss Betty, Popeye created by Fleischer Studios
In the pre-research stage, the studio has almost finished watching each episode of ‘Popeye’ that they can find, and has drawn a lot of inspiration from the environment and character design, as well as the relatively violent cartoons of that era, which have become the inspiration materials for combat design.
Coupled with the curiosity and non-exclusion of the game style of the game style, Fumi Games decided to stick to the style of the rubber tube animation.
However, this decision presents a huge technical challenge, especially in the player guidance and pathfinding. ‘In color games, there is really no sign to add some yellow or other color marks, but we can’t,’ he said. ‘In order to complete this work with only black and white, we have learned a lot of new skills.’
Mithalak said frankly that in animation production, the team uses computer-aided to improve efficiency, but the core technique is still true to the frame-by-frame hand-painted tradition of the 1930s and 1940s. According to his estimate, if the traditional pen and paper process is completely adopted, the development cycle will be calculated in units of ‘years’. The repeated tug-of-war between retro techniques and modern efficiency runs through the entire development process.
The reason why this development process is worthy of detail is because it reveals a core qualities of ‘Detective Jack Mouse’: this game is an ‘anti-mainstream’ product from the beginning of the project. Its art style is not the result of business strategy, but the insistence of the creator’s aesthetic preferences. This temperament has penetrated into all aspects of the game, and also paved the way for the polarization of later evaluations.
02
1930s style, 2020s experience
After the game experience, you can feel that ‘Detective Jack Mouse’ is just a retro style, but the gameplay and presentation are not retro at all.
The story of ‘Detective Jack Mouse’ takes place in an overhead city ‘Mouseburg’ composed of anthropomorphic rodents. Players play the role of private detective Jack Pepper (Jack Pepper) and gradually get involved in a conspiracy network of conspiracy in a seemingly ordinary disappearance case. The game actually adopts a more classic linear detective narrative context, and the protagonist is not passively solve the case because of ‘listed as a suspect’, but actively pursues the truth as a detective.
The shooting system is the core experience module of the game. The arsenal starts from the pistol, and gradually unlocks the Thompson submachine gun (called ‘James gun’ in the game), shotgun, explosives, And very creative special weapons such as ‘removing lacquerware’ – launching a certain gelatinous substance, which can dissolve the flesh and blood of the enemy, only the skeleton is left.
The visual soul of ‘Detective Jack Mouse’ lies in ‘pure hand-painted rubber tube animation’. The team used the rubber tube animation production technique in the 1930s and 1940s, and completed all the animations by hand-painting by frame. The core feature of this style is the exaggerated elastic deformation. The limbs of the character can be stretched to the exaggerated length and then bounce back, the facial expressions can be extremely distorted, and all physical laws serve comedy and dynamic effects.
Therefore, the dissolution process, coupled with the purely hand-drawn animation effect, does not make people feel terrifying, but has a black humor effect.
It is worth mentioning that every weapon in the game has a viewing animation. Due to the use of the rubber tube style that has no bone setting, the firearm that should be hard and straight looks very ‘Q bomb’, and even the barrel will jump, which further deepens the sense of comedy.
The shooting feel of the game is recognized as ‘smooth and mature’, and the retro shooting gameplay of ‘Thor’s Hammer’ is re-engraved. In terms of maneuverability, the protagonist Jack has a combination of two-stage jumping, sprinting, rotating tail floating hovering, and sliding shovel, which constitutes a combat system with a sense of speed and skill.
In FPS’s most important shooting feedback, since both enemies and firearms are designed in 2D, animation production has become particularly important. This is also the most outstanding and proud part of ‘Detective Jack Mouse’, they use large and exaggerated animation performance to complete the kill feedback In this ring, the animation change of the enemy’s knockdown makes up for the lack of shooting confirmation, and does not make players feel that the bullets are as powerless as they are hitting cotton. Different killing methods and killing distances will show different animation effects, so that there will be no boring repetition of feedback during the game.
The main line process is about 12 to 20 hours, and the total collection can be up to 25 to 30 hours. In terms of music, the original large band jazz soundtrack is played by the real orchestra, which effectively strengthens the immersive atmosphere of the 1930s.
Overall, ‘Detective Jack Mouse’ tries to provide a modern FPS experience with a high degree of ripeness under an extremely stylized visual shell. But it carries a variety of elements: the comedy of the rubber tube animation, the detective narrative of the black movie, and the fast-paced arena shooting, and the chemical reaction between these elements is the core of the evaluation of differences.
03
Two heavens of ice and fire
‘Detective Jack Mouse’, which is expected by many players, presents a rare extreme differentiation at the media rating level, which also arouses a discussion about the game evaluation system.
‘Detective Jack Mouse’ has handed a dazzling transcript at the commercial and word-of-mouth levels. According to the initial data released by PlaySide Studios, the total sales volume of the game is estimated to be about 360,000 copies, and the total output is about 10.4 million US dollars, of which the console platform contributes about 44% of the sales. The Steam platform has received rave reviews, and the number of people online has exceeded 10,000 at the same time.
At the media rating level, most media choose to give high scores. Metacritic PC platform media averaged 80 points, of which Destructoid gave 95 points, PC Gamer gave 86 points, Console Creatures gave 90 points, GameSpot and Game Informer gives 8 points.
However, the world’s largest game entertainment media IGN, which we are familiar with, only gives a low score of 6 points.
IGN’s core criticism focuses on: the black movie narrative and shooting gameplay ‘stitched together bluntly, the two conflict with each other, weakening each other’; the cheese stalk and puns in the game Excessive flooding, making it difficult for players to resonate with anything; the narrative style does not match the tone of the black movie; the arena level forcibly clears all the enemies; players in the investigation process are completely unable to participate.
Around this disagreement, community discussions quickly divided into two camps.
The side of criticism of IGN believes that the reviewer uses the aesthetic standard of serious black movies to measure a ‘spoof shooting game inspired by Mickey Mouse cartoon’, which is a dislocation of the evaluation framework. ‘Detective Jack Mouse’ has been a Boomer that emphasizes operation feedback and nostalgia since the establishment of the project. Shooter, it does not intend to imitate the serious narrative of the ‘Eagle of Malta’, but seeks an absurd chemical reaction between the aesthetics of cartoonized violence and the cold detective narrative. There are also players who have compared the previous ratings of ‘Call of Duty: Black Ops 7’ and ‘Red Desert’ to IGN, questioning the consistency of their grading standards.
But is ‘Detective Jack Mouse’ necessarily flawed?
Actually not. The evaluation of the ‘overflowing cheese stalks and puns in the game’ mentioned by IGN may be the most obvious one for Chinese players.
Although this game comes with its own simplicity, the Chinese translation in the game basically literally translates the black humor of English lines, and because the game is frequent and intertextual with classic works, players in some regions may think that this is a intensive joke, but some players in the region will feel tired. In simple terms, it is not very good to get the laughter.
Many media also pointed out that the game has a limited sense of participation at the detective reasoning level, which may be a gap for players who are looking forward to the ‘detective game’ experience.
Why is there such a disparity in score difference? From an industry perspective, this is not an individual mistake of a single media, but reflects the more common dilemma of the evaluation system – the choice of evaluation criteria.
Many players believe that IGN uses the aesthetic standard of serious black movies to measure a ‘spoof inspired by Mickey Mouse cartoons’, which is essentially the positioning of ‘I don’t understand the game at all’. Writer Mikhail J. Clive even directly sarcastically said that this review by IGN is ‘like a spoof work by a game reporter’.
At the same time, the player evaluation system has gradually changed due to the rise of the player community. As analyzed by many media reports, more and more players no longer use traditional media ratings as the core reference, but more trust Steam user evaluation, independent UP main video analysis and community reputation. In contrast, ‘outsiders’ such as industry investors and capitalists still tend to rely on the scoring indicators of traditional media, which has led to the gradual distance between the evaluation system and actual players’ needs.
Therefore, the situation of ‘Detective Jack Mouse’ also poses a question worth pondering for the game industry: when the creative core of a game itself is anti-traditional, hybrid, and deliberately absurd, does the traditional evaluation system have enough explanatory power?
IGN uses the standard of black movies to criticize a cartoon FPS that is not ‘black’ enough, which is like criticizing an absurd comedy for not being ‘serious’ enough.
But in turn, if we only judge by the ‘retro cool shot’ standard, then are the narrative elements of the black movie really just a meaningless decoration? The tearing between these two positions is precisely the most interesting part of ‘Detective Jack Mouse’. Therefore, when the evaluator’s expectations and the original intention of the work are misaligned, the meaning of the score itself will be greatly reduced.
‘Detective Jack Mouse’ is neither a perfect game, nor is it a mediocre work of ‘6-point level’. Its strengths and weaknesses are equally obvious, so that any attempt to summarize it with a score is destined to be controversial.
But for Fumi Games, a team that started with 4-player animation studios, ‘Detective Jack Mouse’ has proved one thing: in addition to chasing mainstream aesthetics and avoiding risks, it is still possible to find its own position in the market in the creative direction of differentiation. They rejected the suggestion of ‘doing color’ and insisted on black and white hand-painted style. In the end, this uncompromising became the core competitiveness of the game.
As for the crack between IGN’s 6 points and Steam’s rave reviews, perhaps the best attitude is not to rush to stand in line, but regard it as a Helpful reminder: In today’s increasingly blurred game genre boundaries, the way we evaluate the game also needs to keep up with the speed of the game itself.
原创文章，作者：gallonwang，禁止转载：https://youxichaguan.com/en/archives/194152
