Like any foolishly hopeful gamer, I sat in the darkness of my home, booting up a game I prayed would shine bright enough to live up to its promise. A black-and-white shooter set in a city full of mice? A classic cartoon animation style? A gumshoe noir plot? The idiosyncrasies stacked like Jenga blocks, and one faulty element could send the whole tower tumbling. But isn’t that always the way in Gamer Town, where promising pitches are a dime a dozen, and few successfully pull off their daring dreams.
Mouse: P.I. For Hire, the long-awaited indie first-person shooter spawned from a post on X, is finally coming out on Thursday after years of trailers and teasers, and at a modest $30 price to boot. Though its creators from Polish studio Fumi Games insist that the game’s look is more broadly inspired by the 1930s “rubber hose” style of animation popularized by Betty Boop and Fleischer cartoons, it’s not hard to see visual similarities with Steamboat Willie, the black-and-white character that preceded Mickey Mouse. A lot of Mouse: P.I. For Hire’s appeal lies in the vintage cartoony style contrasting with violent gunfire — and after playing half a dozen hours of the game, that does make up a lot of its charm.
But it’s a pleasure to discover all the visual style overlays a fairly involved narrative riddled with classic noir elements. Players control Jack Pepper, a war hero turned hard-boiled detective whose pursuit of a missing persons case leads him from the bright lights of Mouseburg’s fine society to its seedy back alleys and dangerous criminal underbelly, uncovering a vast conspiracy in the process.
Mouse: P.I. For Hire is packed to the gills with noir staples like a gumshoe protagonist, a femme fatale love interest, political corruption, social inequality, dirty cops and a bulletin board where our detective fills in the case clue by clue. Despite the cartoon animation and rubber hose violence, the noir is played straight; it’s clear that this is a love letter to the genre of detective fiction made famous by American fiction writers.
In conversation with Fumi Games lead producer Maciej Krzemień last June at Summer Game Fest, the team working on the game took inspiration from stories by famed noir writer Raymond Chandler, and the narrative leads did plenty of historical research to get the period right.
“Obviously, we are not Americans ourselves. We wanted to get a good grasp on this entire style of detective noir stories, but with some light-hearted elements to it,” Krzemień told me.
A good chunk of the success of Pepper’s character belongs to his voice actor, Troy Baker, who delivers one-liners and exposition in gravelly tones that fit a hard-boiled detective narrating the case throughout the game. The rest of the voice cast is suitably pleasant — Florian Clare as journalist Wanda Fuller, Frank Todaro as politician and Pepper’s war buddy Cornelius Stilton, among others — giving a range of period-appropriate performances ranging from Mid-Atlantic faux-sophistication to a streetwise accent hailing from whatever New Jersey analogue they have near Mouseburg.
The dialogue is fittingly noir, and the writing in the game is a mix of 1930s-era dark humor and groan-worthy puns (which is a good thing, I swear). Mice end the day with a long pull of stinky cheese to take the edge off, bootleggers are “cheeseleggers,” a gun modeled after the German Mauser pistol is named the Micer, and so on.
Though the game’s soundtrack is an appropriate mix of big band and jazzy tunes, Mouse: P.I. For Hire’s commitment to evoking the 1930s extends further. An optional filters layer in film grain and gauzy blur to the visuals, as well as degrading the audio quality of the music to sound like it’s coming out of vinyl or wax cylinders. Looking and sounding more old-timey is a fun addition to the immersion.
But Mouse: P.I. For Hire is a shooting game first and foremost, and while its combat has more pros than cons, there are enough challenges in adapting its luscious animation style to 3D shooting to make it feel like a mixed bag.
Mouse: P.I. For Hire is more of a joyfully immersive jaunt than a masterpiece shooter
Mouse: P.I. For Hire feels a lot like a modern version of the initial wave of first-person shooters, like Doom and Duke Nukem: Enemies enter a room the player is in, shoot from a distance or close in for melee. Like some so-called “Boomer shooters” released in recent years that evoke old-school shooter vibes with updated controls, enemies don’t have a lot of dynamic movement, leading players to trade gunfire and swap to the right weapon for the moment.
Players get an expanding arsenal of BioShock-like weapons, leaning on a pistol, shotgun and Thompson submachine gun for the grunt work alongside a delightfully novel Devarnisher gun that shoots globs of turpentine (the chemical that old school animators used to wipe away ink) to melt foes. There’s more in later parts of the game, and upgrades to boot, that make guns more useful throughout the game.
The Devarnisher melts enemies with turpentine.
Mouse: P.I. For Hire isn’t trying to be a cutting-edge shooter, so it’s mostly fine to get into firefights with static foes. The trouble lies in combining the game’s visual style with shooting action: Enemies look like they’ve walked straight out of a cartoon, but their gorgeously animated 2D bodies can be tough to hit in 3D space. Often, as I strafe around, I’ll struggle to hit smaller foes, and their hitbox can get a little confusing, leading me to miss some shots I thought I should hit.
This isn’t too big a deal on the easy and standard difficulties, which are pretty forgiving, but when I cranked it up to hard mode (which you can do on the fly), the punishing damage made my unsure aim more of an issue. I stumbled here or there trying to keep my bullets landing on enemies — especially distant ones.
While a little perplexing, it’s ultimately a minor drawback to a well-crafted experience. Mouse: P.I. For Hire is a period piece joyride, and so long as I treat the rooms full of enemies and bosses as flavor in a story, I’m far from disappointed. Not every shooter needs to be the next Portal or Titanfall 2, reinventing the genre, especially games priced at $30 that will likely last players over a dozen hours before they hit credits.
What the game gets right is its dual commitments to its animation style and its intricate world. I’ll never get tired of watching the rubber hose-style animations of reloading guns or popping enemy heads with a close-range shotgun blast in a comically visceral burst of violence. It’s a delightful counterpart to Mouseburg, a gritty but believable city with all the characters and locales, power struggles and plot twists you’d find in any other noir.
Early in the game, I tracked down a lead at an opera house where I foiled an assassination attempt on a politician — though it was made with an on-stage cannon that started burning the place down, and I had to fight a burly Brunhilda-clad singer miniboss to get out. The blend of gumshoe staples with cartoon logic makes Mouse: P.I. For Hire truly unique, and its Steamboat Willie look obscures that the game is deeper than it initially appears in its dedication to telling a detective story, with all of that genre’s murky twists and turns.
“Without spoiling anything, there is a bigger conspiracy behind it all, and it’s all pretty serious in terms of social topics, social themes of the game, and it actually reflects the political climate of the world back in the 1930s — and not only in America,” Krzemień told me last June.
So yes, it is a game where non-Mickey Mouse gets a gun, but all in the service of uncovering a mystery, fighting a rising fascist threat and hopefully getting enough cheddar to pay his debts.
Mouse: P.I. For Hire comes out April 16 for PC, Xbox One X/S, PS5 and Nintendo Switch 2.
