Games worth discovering

Who You Gonna Call? Mousebusters! - Mousebusters Review

772 View2022-09-15

When I was growing up, I believed that ghosts were real. My mom would tell me superstitious stories whenever I misbehaved. It was her way of keeping my misfit to a minimum, and surprisingly, it worked pretty well. I grew terrified of ghost stories and generally anything that went bump in the night.

I’m now in my 20s, but I’m still living with a fragment of that morbid fear that haunted my childhood. I’m trying to move past it and overcome my phobia of the unknown, though, and I feel an inch closer to that goal after playing Mousebusters, a narrative-driven game about cute mice saving their local neighborhood from ghosts.

Mousebusters is a pixel-art horror adventure heavily inspired by the 1984 film Ghostbusters. Instead of that classic’s main cast of four dorky men driving around town trapping ghosts, it’s two adorable mice protecting residents of a local apartment complex from these otherworldly beings. The majority of this experience is free-to-play, but the hour-long final chapter requires a one-time purchase of $4.49.

You begin Mousebusters as a newly-settled tenant moving into one of the apartments in a run-down complex. Little do you know your new home is cursed, and upon falling asleep there for the first time, you transform into a mouse. You meet another mouse called Boss and begin a journey to vanquish ghosts and lift the curse.

Mousebusters tells a simple story but adds layers of charm and intrigue through witty, comedic dialogue. It built on its narrative foundation by allowing me the freedom to choose where to explore and what to interact with. Those tiny choices added up and helped me feel immersed in this tiny world.

While these choices determine the outcome of your adventure, they don’t significantly impact progress. There’s no grave punishment for making the wrong decision; you just get a slap on the wrist and are forced to choose differently. I never felt dissuaded from exploring obviously wrong choices; rather, my curiosity was welcomed by the game. I always knew there’d be some joke tied to the end of that bad path. Once I figured that out, I began purposefully heading in the worst direction every chance I got, just to see what the goofy payoff would be.

If story progression and exploration make up approximately half of Mousebusters, then the less interesting half of the game is taken up by the actual busting of ghosts. You’d think that defeating otherworldly beings would be the most invigorating part of Mousebusters, but I was sorely disappointed.

A majority of the scenarios where I had to eliminate ghosts followed a repetitive formula. My character would be faced with a series of obstacles that needed to be overcome by interacting with objects in the environment. The ghost would only appear after I interacted with the right things in the right order.

But once I got my phantom target to show up, there was nothing much to actually defeating it. Upon confronting the specter, I fired my handy-dandy ghost-killing pistol, and whoosh, the ghost was dead. That’s it! This anticlimax felt like such a letdown within the context of Mousebuster’s narrative. The ghost encounters should have been the hook of the game, but they fell disappointingly short.

Disappointment with the gameplay aside, I still think Mousebusters is worth a try. The free-to-play portion of the game lasts around an hour and a half and is filled with minigames and side stories about the residents that live within the complex. And if that segment wins you over, the final episode will be worth every penny of its tiny asking price. The splendid pixel art and witty, engaging story shine well above the actual mechanics here, but then again, maybe it was good for teaching me the lesson that ghosts aren’t all that spooky after all. In fact, they’re kind of chumps.

SCORE: 3 STARS OUT OF 5

PLAY IF YOU LIKE:

• Ghostbusters. If you enjoy the thrill of ghost hunting mixed with light-hearted humor as seen in Ghostbusters, you might enjoy Mousebusters for providing a similar feeling.

• Bear’s Restaurant. If you like Bear’s Restaurant—another game published by the makers of Mousebusters, which is also a pixel art game—you may like playing Mousebusters.

💬 Have you played Mousebusters? What did you think of it? And if you haven’t, what’s your favorite Ghostbusters movie?

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