The freedom afforded to indie developers is obvious: they can make passion projects without the fear of mainstream audience demands, and they can create without the influence of a suit. Not that an indie developer would mind a game of theirs accidentally becoming a massive success, of course. (See: Undertale, Balatro.) But the greater point for them is the fulfillment of their ideas, the flight of fancy of creation, and the need to bring into existence the fringe ideas that occupies them. Such is the sense one gets, at least, when trying out the micro games of indie developer Shinlalala, and particular Mousegun.
Cute Erotica Via Effort
Mousegun is easy to pick and play for anyone that’s spent time in the genre.
French solo dev Shinlalala recently released Mousegun—a cute, action-packed, mildly-erotic FPS made in the Godot open source game engine. “Mildly” in the sense that the erotic content is largely hidden as a reward for the game play, and the reward itself—brief but erotic scenes of the titular main character pin-up posing (and, if you get all the challenges done, a bit more x-rated)—can be completely eluded if you don’t work hard enough at the thing that clearly matters most to the developer: the actual playing of the game.
And what is “the game?” Mousegun is a sci-fi shooter where you play the titular femboy space soldier “Mousegun.” Mousegun fights off hordes of robots and machinery set to shoot him down, and does so with a flat 2D-sprites-in-3D that feels like it was thinking about early FPS titles like Doom, though the game play has far more modern influences. This is especially felt in its melee attack, which guarantees health drops at the risk of getting close to enemies set out to kill you.
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Balancing Fetish Rewards and FPS Action
Is it a bit fetish-y? Yes and no. Anyone that balks at funny cartoon characters being sexy was probably never going to be a sale for this, but outside of that, the game itself focuses very hard on fast paced shooting and item hunting. One might beat the game if they are well-versed in the genre, but the “challenges” to clear to get any of the scenes are hard enough that it’s very unlikely someone will fulfill all of them on their first try. This makes Mousegun a fun romp that still offers a good return of awards for its small run time. Three levels, three challenges, three scenes.
Hard to complain about 1:1 balancing decisions considering how grindy modern gaming has become. It’s also especially difficult to do that when Shinlalala’s games are all, at the time of this writing, obstinately free, and a real testament of the passion of his work. I don’t, for the record, think it should be expected for all indie developers to just give away their games for some “exposure” BS. But in Shinlalala’s case, they are largely prototyping on the fly, and they know it. It just so happens that there work is also simple and polished enough to “feel” like complete experiences, despite their small run times and scope
Mousegun’s Aim Isn’t Flawless
Not that this micro game nails all its ideas, of course. The choice to allow a player to aim up and down in a game with virtually no verticality is odd, particularly considering there are no settings to invert the camera. Players more comfortable with inverted controls will simply have to suck it up.
Also, for an erotic game, certainly the enemies could’ve been a little bit more attractive then triangle men. It’s obvious the artist is capable of it, and capable of getting a lot out of a little detail. So, the choice to make the robots so unbelievably shapeless is a choice. Hell, put a strap-on vibrator on one. It’s an erotic game, right? Maybe what I’m suggesting is against the scope and spirit of the concept of a micro-game. But if there was any lacking area this game suffered from, it was just how disconnected its candy-coated shooting and erotic scenes felt to each other. When Mousegun loses, he’s ass-up in a kind of ripped suit. That’s funny, a little hot, and a little shocking that there isn’t at any point that that sprite has more being done with it, if you know what I mean.
But(t) It Has Big Ideas
Mousegun can be described as “Femboys with Firearms.”
And maybe this is just a cheap transition, but it’s a nice reminder of how innovation can be found in the most surprising places. Mousegun is compatible with buttplug.io, an open source software used to control intimate products such as The Handy, Lovesense, and others. I regret to inform you this reviewer cannot speak to the implementation of such a feature, but I have a lot of respect for the idea, and also genuinely wonder how much the difficulty of the game will change if you’re trying to aim and vibrating at the same time. I can only imagine that is an entirely new gaming experience (and maybe there’s a future review of such a feature down the line. If I’m being honest: I want to know more.)
Overall, it’s a different challenge to rate Mousegun, and Shinlalala’s games by the metrics we normally apply to games here. These are games meant to be played in shorter sessions for the low, low cost of whatever you feel like giving the developer. Could Mousegun be iterated on to be a larger, better game? Absolutely. Does that make Mousegun a worse game because it’s not this bigger, grander experience? I don’t think so at all.
It does what it wants to do, boldly, quickly, then moves on. There’s something nice to say about a game that respects your time and still gives you something to chew on.
PROS:
- Easy to pick up FPS with good speed and decent controls
- A very interesting parry system that encourages more aggressive game play
- Cute art, cuter rewards for clearing challenges
- Challenging enough without being prohibitively difficult
- Fem-boys with firearms
- Buttplug.io compatibility. (Is this the first buttplug compatible FPS? Is there a person on the planet that tracks that sort of thing?)
- Pay-what-you-want-model for a game that probably deserves at least a few of your dollars
CONS:
- Lack of inverted camera options
- Unusual choice to have vertical movement on camera in a platform-less, low ceiling FPS
Overall Score: 77/100
Source: itch.io
