I’ll be honest, the moment I saw Mouse: P.I. For Hire announced, something clicked. A first-person shooter built around 1930s rubber hose animation, set in a corrupt anthropomorphic city where everyone is a mouse and the jazz never stops? That’s an idea so specific and so clearly the result of someone’s very particular obsession that it either ends up being a masterpiece or a beautiful disaster. Developer Fumi Games, published by PlaySide, put it out on April 16th 2026, and I’m delighted to tell you it is very firmly the former.
You play as Jack Pepper, a private investigator voiced by Troy Baker, dragged into a missing persons case in the city of Mouseburg that very quickly spirals into something involving crooked cops, slippery politicians and the kind of shadowy corruption that only makes sense in a world where everyone has big round ears and bounces slightly when they walk. The writing is sharp and funny, the characters are memorable, and there’s a genuine story here worth seeing through to its end. The whole thing takes around twelve hours, which feels exactly right.
Gameplay-wise, this sits firmly in the boomer shooter camp, a teeth-rattling-retro-nostalgia-blast-em-up (it’ll catch on). You’re moving fast, never aiming down sights, burning through an arsenal that includes revolvers, tommy guns, a Carcano rifle, dynamite and more, all with an unlockable alternate fire mode you can research and unlock at weapon upgrade workbenches. The Devarnisher, for instance, can be upgraded to fire an enormous acid ball that coats a whole group of enemies at once, which is exactly as satisfying as it sounds. Managing your ammo across the various weapons is one of the more interesting parts of the combat loop, forcing you to rotate through your arsenal rather than just sticking to a favourite.
The enemies themselves are where things get slightly less impressive. Most of them fall into one of two camps: melee lads who charge at you, and gun lads who stand still and shoot at you. It does start to feel a bit repetitive by the final stretch of the game. The boss fights, though, are genuinely excellent, creative and demanding in a way the regular combat sometimes isn’t. One requires you to line up cannon shots against an enemy cycling through the windows of a building while their lackeys swarm you outside. Another has you tracking an apparition around a graveyard with a flashlight, which then splits into multiple copies to disorient you. They’re brilliant.
Visually, this is the game’s killer punch. The entire thing is rendered in black and white with that classic rubber hose style, all wobbly limbs and exaggerated death animations, and it is absolutely gorgeous. The variety of locations is impressive too, ranging from opera houses and harbours to swamps, production studios and a haunted village, each one overflowing with environmental detail and little jokes tucked into corners. There’s a web in one level with a derby-hatted spider rubbing a knife and fork together while eyeing its catch. It’s that kind of game. None of it feels like parody; it’s a genuine and sincere tribute to cartoons like Steamboat Willie, just with considerably more violence and a body count.
The big band jazz soundtrack deserves its own mention. It is outstanding, and entirely in keeping with the world Fumi Games have built. Between the music, the art direction and the voice performances, the level of commitment to the aesthetic is frankly remarkable. I do like the subtle sung version of the main music theme as the developer logos are displaying when first firing up the game. That’s a neat touch.
There are optional side quests given by the residents of Mouseburg that are well worth doing, expanding on Jack’s relationships and featuring some of the best writing in the game. Exploration is rewarded with hidden areas, collectibles and money for upgrades. The whole thing has a lovely rhythm to it, heading back to base between missions to pin clues on a corkboard and chat with locals before heading back out into the chaos.
It’s not perfect. Early moments make you question the quality of the shooting action until you find the more meaty guns, and the enemy variety runs thin and could have been bolstered a bit, but at least a handful of early post-launch bugs have been patched out in the first couple of hotfixes since release, so things are pretty smooth now. But when it comes to samey bad guys, when you’re sprinting through a beautifully animated noir city with a tommy gun in one hand and a stick of dynamite in the other while a jazz band absolutely loses its mind on the soundtrack, it’s very hard to care.
Mouse: P.I. For Hire knows exactly what it wants to be, and it nails it.
Reviewed on PC
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