Game Theory - There's Too Much Cheese?!

Episode Date: May 15, 2026

IGN seems to think there is TOO much cheese in Mouse P.I. and honestly…this made me wonder if this is truly the case. It’s one thing to FEEL like there’s a lot of cheese in this game, but if you do the MATH, do the numbers back you up?

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At least, that's what IGN seemed to think. But while the internet was ripping them to shreds, I wanted to do the math and see if their take was as monstrous as it first seemed. Or were they onto something Gouda? Hello, internet! Welcome to Game Theory, the show that's always a little cheesy no matter how you slice it. Yeah, get ready for a bunch of cheese puns today, theorists. Because we're talking about the newly released and wonderfully punny game, mouse PI. This thing is just bursting with character.

stylized like rubber host cartoons from the 20s and 30s, much like Cuphead, but rather than being a platformer, it's a Doom-esque boomer shooter. It also has some pretty great voice acting, and the entire thing is hand-drawn. Everything you see characters, weapons. It's drawn by hand, frame by frame, everything you see in the game is handcrafted. In a world where AI keeps threatening to take away artists' jobs, is it any surprise that people were excited for a game that truly celebrates artists? And if you want to celebrate artists, here, you can go and grab our 15 year anniversary poster that's linked in the description, but to top it all off, this world is full of mystery and interesting lore to dive into.

I actually had a whole theory lined up about the seedy underbelly of the mouse PI world that I was super stoked to get into, but apparently not everyone was as excited for this game as I was. In fact, some people thought it was a bit cheesy, too cheesy. One specific review from IGN has drummed up a bit of controversy in the gaming community. They gave the game a 6 out of 10 because of, well, a lot of things, but the internet is focused on one thing specifically. The reviewers complaint of too much cheese in a game about mice. Although it is nice to finally have a sequel to Too Much Water, people were tearing them apart like a cheese string. Yes, Auntie, you are supposed to peel them, not just bite them like an animal.

I thought you were the food guy. Anyway, while everyone was taking their turns, getting their jabs in, my game theory cog started to turn. I wondered, is there, in fact, too much cheese? Or is this reviewer just lactose intolerant? It's one thing to feel like there's a lot of cheese in a game, but if you do the math, do the numbers back you up. I mean, reviews should be objective based on facts, not subjective opinions, after all.

So, don your fedora and trench coats loyal theorists, because we're about to follow the stench and track down how much cheese is stinking up mouse PI, to see if IGN was justified, or should we never bereave one of their reviews ever again. In Mouse P.I. For Hire, you play as a private eviscerator mouse for hire, if that wasn't obvious. His name is Jack Jack, which is also a very simple reference to the deliciously spicy cheese, Pepper Jack. The cheese was right under our noses the whole time, guys. This made me look even deeper into the names of our major characters. There are 14 characters that appear enough in the game for me to count them as notable, and a lot of their names are just cheese puns.

You have Cornelius Stilton, named after Stilton cheese, a century-old blue cheese from England that apparently was originally served, back in the 1700s riddled with mites and maggots. Okay, I'm starting to understand why people say British food is bad. Another cheese-based character is Steve Bandle, named after the unique cheese from West Bengal, India. Bandel, cheese. There's also a million miles last name, curd, like curds of cheese. And finally, Professor von Hauser, an evil German named after a German sour milk.

So, six of the 14 main characters have cheesy inspirations to their name, which is about 43% cheesy. That's pretty cheesy, but one, it's not the majority. And two, let's be honest. Six names spread across a 12 to 20 hour game isn't all that much. At most, it's a new cheese every two hours. But the names aren't the only place where cheese puns are going to get jammed down your throat. The main reference to cheese, and what I suspect the IGN reviewer was referencing, was the dialogue.

Unfortunately, at the time of writing, there is no script for MousePI publicly available. So, I played through the game and noted down every single line of dialogue. Turns out, the game is about 28,653 words. Don't say I never do anything for you. With this rag tag script in hand, I can now tell you about any and all mentions of cheese that exist. Obviously, there's references to the characters I've already mentioned. Jack is mentioned 137 times. Pepper is mentioned 28 times.

Curd 27 times. Bandel is mentioned 13 times. Stilton is mentioned 8 times. And Hartzer twice. So far, that's 215 mentions of cheese already. But that feels a little too easy. Of course, character names are going to be mentioned. What about just pure cheese punnery?

Well, the actual word cheese or cheesy appears a whopping 106 times. There's also the use of cheddar, which happens five times. There are plenty of variants to play with two. You have fondue, which is mentioned 17 times. Blue, which is mentioned 11 times. Motorola is mentioned seven times, Bree four times, and Gorgonzola is mentioned twice. You also have provolone, Gouda, Feta and Parmesan, which are all mentioned once. All of that together totals 371 cheese mentions throughout the entire 28,653 word.

of dialogue, that is a lot of cheese. In fact, that's one mention of cheese about every 77 words. And since we know that the average person speaks at about 150 words per minute, we can break those statistics down even further. For about every one minute of dialogue, there is 1.94 mentions of cheese. If you mention cheese that much in every single conversation, I start to get a little bit worried. However, that's only true if the game was just dialogue. There's a lot of just running and gunning your way through with very little speys.

In fact, if you were to speak all of this dialogue in one go, the game would be just over three hours long. And this thing takes 12 to 20 hours to complete. The dialogue is at most. One quarter of the game, and only 1% of that 25% is cheese. But this still doesn't feel like enough evidence for me. Sure, we've counted words, and that's good fun, but words are just that. Words. They're not really tangible as an amount.

They don't have any real meaning or weight to them. If I wanted to know if scientifically there was too much cheese, I needed to have something physical. Something that I could use to compare to the real world. I needed to count the actual size and amount of physical cheese in the game. I didn't think there be all that much. When I was first playing, I didn't really notice any. I was mostly focused on the magnificent cheese puns. But clearly, that had just overwhelmed my senses because as I went through my gameplay footage,

I realized that cheese was basically everywhere. Posters were covered in cheesy references, cheese wheels and slices were dotted around the map. Heck, even the moonshine jugs you see littering Moussberg are all actually filled with cheese. But I was dedicated to the cause at this point, so I started my long journey to counting every single piece of cheese by hand. That's right, I went through the map again and literally counted every single piece. This was going to be a monumental task. The game is about 24 levels and there is no level replay. Plus, within those levels, there are lots of.

of points of no return. Once you get through a section of the map, you're unable to return to it, which is fine in normal gameplay, but not great if you're counting cheese. But I was not deterred. I made a special spreadsheet to track the data, and I got to work. Guys, there are so many kinds of cheese in this game. We've got health cheese, cheese slices, cheese wheels, cheese vents, fondue jugs, anti-pastro trays, and cigars. Yes, every single cigar you see in the game is actually a cheese stick. I also counted every time a cheese was mentioned in writing or drawn on a poster, and I found all the unique cheese assets used that don't fit any of the categories I've already mentioned. Finally, if we return to a location at any point, I only counted the new cheese that showed up.

Got it? Gouda. I hope you're ready for a lot of numbers, theorists. In the tutorial, I encountered 66 cheeses. In the next level, banishing act, I got 77 cheeses. There's 44 cheeses in Jack Pepper's office and the attached buildings. I also stopped by one of the various roadhouses and got the cheese count in there, too. 20. In Bandles Lab, it goes all the way down to nine cheeses.

Wait, was this game really running out of cheese? Oh, by no means, theorists. Because then, I got to clergy row. This level is the cheesiest thing I've ever seen. Around nearly every corner was a new cheese store filled to the brim with cheese. Every time I thought I was done, boom, more cheese. It was literally endless. Overall, I found 310 cheese slices, 625 cheese wheels,

43 jugs of cheese-legged fondue, two antipasto trays, 17 cigars, 10 references to cheese, two other miscellaneous cheeses, and three help cheeses to top it all off. That total to... In Toronto, every arrival is a statement, and nothing says it better than this. Cadillac Optic was the number one selling luxury EV in Canada for 2025. Find your rhythm across a seamless 33-inch display and an immersive 19 speaker AKG surround audio system. This city demands agility, and Optic delivers with precision to make every drive extraordinary.

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Visit Activia.ca for more details. 1,012 cheeses in this level alone. It was at this moment that I wanted nothing more than to turn back, drop this case forever, and forget I ever decided to make this video at all. But I was in too deep. The world needed to truly know how cheesy mouse pie was, so I pressed on. I dove straight into the curdled abyss, that is, Mouseburg.

The next level, the old subway, had 333 cheeses in it. This time, due to the cheese. the absurd amount of cheese-legging happening in these subways. 308 total jugs of the stuff. This may not seem like a lot because, well, anything looks lackluster next to the 1,012 cheeses I just witnessed, but this is still more cheeses than the first three locations combined. The next map is the Tinsle Brothers Lot, which had 41 cheeses. Then we went to the burnt opera ruins, and I only counted two new cheeses there.

Wallop Bay had 96 cheeses and Kerdsville had 95. I was hoping that these cheese counts would stay nice and low, for the sake of my sanity, But this is when we get to the far wetlands and everything was off the table once again. There is a whopping 787 cheeses in this map, most of which being wheels, slices and of course jugs because this is another sanctuary for cheese legging. Then we went into the depths where all the shrews were hiding and we found 282 instances of cheese down there. 223 of those cheeses are jugs once again.

Thankfully, that was the last really cheesy map. For the rest of the game, all the level cheese counts remained under 120, which is great because if I had another level of over 500 cheeses, I was going to have to check myself into the Cardsville Nut House along with Jack. So, after going through every single level, the grand total cheese I found was, drum roll please, 3,543 cheeses. 1,330 of those were cheese wheels,

1,037 of those were cheese-legging jugs, and 571 were cheese slices. That sounds like a lot of cheese, perhaps, maybe even too much cheese, but what did those numbers mean in real-world measurements? Well, if you look at just the cheese wheels and slices that we see in the game, each slice of cheese is about one quarter of a full wheel. So, if we divide the slice count by four, then add that to the cheese wheel count, we get a total of 1,472.75 cheese wheels. Now we just have to determine what type of cheese those cheese wheels are actually made from.

Turns out a lot of cheese happens to come in wheel form. But when you get a closer look at the asset of the cheese wheel and their matching slices, we see that these wheels have one defining feature. They have holes in them. Holes and cheese like this are actually called eyes, and they are created due to a bacteria in the cheese producing CO2 during the cheese making process. They're present mostly in Swiss and Dutch cheese styles. Additionally, the cheese wheels in the game seem to melt really well, since they're used for cheese legging,

and we literally see one of these wheels partially melted in the game. The way this melts plus the holes makes it look like one specific type of cheese. Swiss reclettes. You know, the one you've probably seen in those viral cheese scraping videos. I mean, just look at it. how that cheese melts. My gosh. Plus, reclet rind typically is slightly darker and way more textured than the light creamy cheese inside, which is very similar to the cheese we see in the game. Reclet wheels typically have a diameter of about 15 inches and weigh roughly 18 pounds each,

meaning the cheese in the game would weigh about 26,500 pounds or 13.25 tons. If you lined up these wheels next to each other, they would stretch over four whole miles. Now, these calculations only account for 53% of all the cheese we can see in the game, but it doesn't really matter that we haven't counted all of the others, because the truth is, this is too much cheese, if you're a mouse. For ages, it's been generally believed that mice love cheese. Scholars believe the idea originated back in the middle ages, back when people used to store food in caves or cellars,

both of which mice had easy access to compared to the meat that was hanging on hooks. And the wheels were only protected by a thin coating of wax or cheesecloth. So, peasants would return to their meager cheese caves, and find the wheels had been nibbled on. But the thing is, this stereotype was built entirely on lies. In reality, mice don't actually eat cheese. A healthy diet for mice is actually made up of nuts, grains and dried fruit. If they're raiding your pantry, they're not looking for cheese,

they're looking for foods that are high in carbs, something like dried pasta or a bar of chocolates. In fact, some cheeses can even be dangerous to mice. They don't have molars to break down foods, so if you feed them a soft gooey cheese like Brie, they could choke on it and die. This game definitely has too much cheese. All the mice we see in this game should be dead, especially our little PI friend who is downing the stuff for a health boost. But if you're a human reviewer, I mean, we have 1.4 billion pounds of cheese in the US cheese caves alone.

And last year, the US sold 14 billion pounds of cheese. Suddenly, 26,000 pounds doesn't seem like all that much, does it? But hey, that's just a theory. A game theory. Spotify, it's Jay Shetty. Are you one of those media strategy people? scrolling through spreadsheets, searching for an audience that pays twice as much attention to your ads than they do on social? Let me introduce you to fans.

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