Thank you White Lion Club Studio for submitting this game through our Steam Curator. Mouse Adventure is an experience that I was not prepared for in the slightest, despite me knowing what I was getting myself into. I’ve played many games for reviews—many games that I would most likely never touch if I wasn’t reviewing them. From the beginning, I knew when choosing Mouse Adventure on the Steam Curator that it has an extremely low budget, but a budget (or lack of) doesn’t suddenly mean that the game will be good or bad. I’ve seen terrible high-budget films and amazing low-budget ones—and the same goes for video games. As long as I feel I can adequately review a game, I’ll give it a shot.

So Mouse Adventure is a 3D platformer. You play as Mouse and he has a hankering for cheese. Unfortunately for Mouse, the cheese machine is broken and the mechanic needs money for repairs. This Minions-looking mechanic sends out Mouse to a forest, a swamp, and a farm to collect money and milk necessary to repair the machine and manufacture the cheese.

Mouse has the ability to run, jump, and throw tomatoes if collected. Keyboard controls are recommended by the developer White Lion Club Studio because gamepad controls aren't fully functional. Running and jumping work fine, but vertical camera movement doesn’t on a controller. You could be unorthodox and use one hand to move with the controller because jumping is done with the left trigger, and use the mouse for camera movement and tossing tomatoes. Outside of that, Mouse does control pretty well. There’s momentum in his jumps and there was never a moment where I experienced unresponsive controls.

The levels themselves have a surprising amount of variety in them. There are plenty of platforming segments and none of them feel the same. You’ll find yourself hopping on turtles to cross a swamp, jumping on springs, or going through a conveyor belt. Some platforming segments can be difficult due to a lack of depth perception and the character blob shadow not being in the accurate place where Mouse lands.

There are generally a lot of mechanics that don’t work as expected, and Mouse Adventure follows the old-school philosophy of “learning by experience”. There’s nothing wrong with that in concept as it encourages experimentation, but it just doesn’t have the intended effect when the mechanics and physics are iffy. There is this one swinging section just before the final area in the first level that I always have the hardest time with. Even after writing this review I still don’t understand how it works. An earlier segment with spikes at the bottom teaches you that a platform moving up increases your momentum, while it does the opposite when moving down. The swing sections do not work like this and it’s almost random whether it wants to kill your momentum or not. The mechanics and physics not working as expected can lead to lots of frustration.

As for how Mouse Adventure looks, overall it looks cheap. I understand that the budget for this game is nearly non-existent but what I mean is that there's this unpolished, unfinished look to it. Every level is also floating on a bright blue background, and without walls and other things blocking it off, you can see the entire level in certain parts because the draw distance is massive.

The music comes from Charles Wolf Music. There are only two pieces played: one for the main menu and home world, and one for the levels. There’s a playfulness in the sounds of the music and it does fit the lighthearted tone of Mouse Adventure. It’s just going to get repetitive since the second song plays for all three levels.

When playing, I did run into some glitches. A few of them have to do with how the physics work. A few times, I was launched into the air very high. Because there is no skybox, this actually let me skip a section in the level because I was flung so high up. A bad glitch I ran into was a hard lock. When falling off the edge in the home world, there is a chance that Mouse won’t respawn on the level. He’ll spawn way off the coast and fall forever, forcing the player to start a new game. Enemy tracking also seems to be somewhat broken as jumping can cause almost all enemies to lose their pathfinding on you.

Moral concerns are extremely few. The only thing to be mindful of is the cartoon violence. It’s very basic as it mostly just consist of Mouse jumping on enemies, hitting them with tomatoes, or Mouse falling over when losing all of his health. I saw exactly one cat in the entire game, and there are a group of strange unknown monsters at the end of the first level (they look a little similar to Wild Things from Where the Wild Things Are).

There is a good platformer underneath Mouse Adventure as White Lion Club Studio does understand the fundamentals of what makes a good platformer. The level design is soild and contains a nice amount of variety that doesn’t make it feel repetitive. The controls are responsive and work (for the most part). However, when it comes to the mechanics and physics, the lack of polish on both manages to hold it back greatly and doesn’t make for a good experience overall. I’m not too sure how long it took me to beat the game because I had to restart about three times, but my Steam profile says 4 hours so I’m assuming it would take somewhere between 2 and 3. I hope White Lion Club Studio doesn’t let this hold them back as with some more refinement, I’m sure they can create a great game one day.