It was last November that I got my first look at The Spirit and the Mouse, French-born and Canadian-based developer Alblune’s 3rd-mouse adventure game set in a charming and stereotypically French town. You play Lili, the mouse of course, and all Lili wants to do is help the faceless and mute but extremely expressive people of Sainte-et-Claire, a name presumably taken from the Quebec village in Bellechasse. The twist on the story is that Lili, while trying to help one of the people of Sainte-et-Claire, is struck by lightning while up a large pole atop the local church and from that near mouse-death experience gains an electric-based spirit friend. OK, “friend” might be a stretch.

Bish, Bash, bosh, a really simple premise and told relatively quickly to get you into the game proper, where you’ll go on to talk to machines full of cartoonish character and Kibblin, an expressive physical representation of electricity. From there it is the usual fair of collecting units to effectively upgrade Lili’s skills or expand gameplay mechanics, with a total of three separate units to measure success. The first and most important is a currency called energy, which you get from shocking highlighted objects, the shocking being a skill obtained from your “friend” Lumion. Light bulbs expand the shop items, and items are bought with energy. While Happiness is what Lumions feeds off of.

Again I’m drawn to say that this is a simple and lighthearted set of tools to get us to the points we need, very PS2-era platformer. Ultimately, that is what The Spirit and the Mouse feels like, though lacking continual death on ridiculously difficult platforming puzzles with checkpoints at the worst places. In fact, throughout my entire experience, there hasn’t been a single point of failure. Some hardliners on what qualifies as a game will say that “then it doesn’t qualify as one.” OK, it is a relaxing, charming, and wonderful experience with family-focused challenges.

That said, the puzzles in the build I’ve played before release are a little buggy: Puzzles that require inputs such as the riddles won’t take the correct answer the first time. The solution I found, in that case, was to get it wrong and only then the confirm button would work on the correct answers. Were the riddles hard? No, that’s sort of the point. The Spirit and the Mouse seems to be aiming for a lovely small-scale adventure as you rake behind some bins for light bulbs and energy, all while you solve problems for the Kibblins to power machines and make the humans happy.

Following the release of BlueTwelve Studio’s Stray, that comparison is blinding in its striking likeness. Similar to the meow button of Stray, The Spirit and the Mouse features an otherwise useless squeak button. Do you use it to talk to the Kibblin and Lumion? No. The comparison, of course, falls apart beyond the fact you play as an animal solving the problems of the locals with an otherwise ancillary button to make the noise that animal makes. The setting and the people you’re helping are quite obviously different, making the comparison only that, a comparison of similar ideas done differently.

What surprised me was simply how optimized and well The Spirit and the Mouse would actually run, even on older hardware. While something like Sunday Gold would run OK, there were noticeable moments of it disagreeing with something. The Spirit and the Mouse did have occasional struggles when loading up areas to explore, but otherwise would stick to 60 fps without much complaint amid exploration and on the highest graphical preset. Not that it is the most demanding of games, but is surprising nonetheless to have so few dramatic dips in performance.

Ultimately, The Spirit and the Mouse is a smaller and more fun experience than its obvious cat-based counterpart, though I think that comparison itself may harm it. A short and refined experience, the comparison will suggest to some that both are equal when they aren’t. Yes, the writing of both are a little excessive to get their points across and other comparisons already made, but I’d argue both have their place depending on your desired experience. I, evidently, want a more charming and cartoonish experience that is colorful when it needs to be and oozing with love.

A PC review copy of The Spirit and the Mouse was provided by Armor Games Studios for the purposes of this review.

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The Spirit and the Mouse

$19.99

7.5

Score

7.5/10

Pros

• A charming small-scale world
• Fun collect-a-thon exploration

Cons

• Slightly buggy
• The camera can be slightly annoying at times