In 2023, Fumi Games was a small Polish studio with a viral idea. A gameplay trailer: a black-and-white cartoon mouse in a trenchcoat, stalking through a noir city with a tommy gun. Rubber hose animation, that elastic Fleischer style from the 1920s and 30s, crammed into a first-person shooter. The idea was too deranged not to spread. Three years later, Mouse is a full game. And the question it has to answer is whether a brilliant idea can sustain a full-length campaign.
Jack Pepper is a war veteran, former cop, now private detective scraping a living in Mouseburg — a city that’s rotten all the way down. He gets handed a missing persons case. A famous magician. An old war buddy. Simple enough. It isn’t. One missing magician becomes corrupt politicians, crooked cops, a Tinseltown underbelly, things I won’t spoil. It escalates fast and keeps escalating. Troy Baker voices Jack, which was a smart call, there’s a tiredness to his delivery that suits a cop-turned-detective who’s traded one rotten institution for another. The Raymond Chandler dialogue hums underneath everything.
And there’s a baseball card game at the Little & Big Bar. Not a token distraction. A proper card game, with its own economy, its own prize ladder, its own meta of batters, pitchers, and tactics cards that you build across the whole campaign. Win enough matches and you unlock one of the game’s best weapons. That tells you everything about what Fumi Games actually built here. This is a world that rewards the curious and punishes those who just want to run from level to level. The newspapers stacked around Mouseburg flesh out its seedy political history. The comic strips tell a parallel story. The locals at the bar have things worth hearing. Fumi built a world, not a backdrop.
Mouseburg actually feels inhabited. It has texture, voice, and a sense of place. The big band jazz soundtrack earns every inch of the atmosphere it creates — a genuine orchestral score that makes the city feel alive in a way the visuals alone couldn’t manage. Every frame hand-drawn, black and white, elastic and strange. There are moments where you stop moving just to look at the place. That makes the cracks all the more frustrating once they show.
Consider what Mouse is actually attempting. It’s a 2026 game modelling 1930s cartoons, soaked in 1940s noir, built on 1990s FPS bones. Three distinct eras of reference are fighting for the same space, and none of them quite clicks in a wholly satisfying way. Jack’s emotional investment in the case, what the conspiracy is actually building toward, what the real threat even is — none of it ever quite comes into focus. The game is too busy elsewhere. And that’s frustrating enough on its own.
The shooting starts on shaky ground, the early weapons are genuinely feeble, enemies faintly inconvenienced by them, but it finds its legs. The arsenal that opens up across the campaign is inventive in ways that feel true to the aesthetic. An acid gun that melts enemies down to their skeleton. Cartoon gadgets that have no business working as well as they do.
The boss fights are where the game really lets loose, visually wild and committed to their own absurdity. Normal difficulty rarely pushes back hard enough, and the investigative sections — the corkboard, the clue-collecting — are automated to the point of meaninglessness. Jack solves the case for you and reads the answer aloud. Detective fiction as wallpaper. But when the game clicks, it really clicks.
The movement is the best thing in the game. Full stop. Grappling across rooftops, bouncing off walls, falling into a double-jump you barely stuck — there’s a looseness to it that’s hard not to have a lot of fun with. I found myself taking longer routes than necessary just to keep moving.
And yet. For all of that, I never quit. Games costing twice the price have lost me inside an hour. Mouse kept pulling me back. Not always because of the shooting or the story, but because Mouseburg itself has a hold on you. There I was, back at the Little & Big Bar, talking to some rodent about a missing magician. That buys Mouse more goodwill than it probably deserves.
Mouse: P.I. For Hire is a remarkable achievement in style, charm, and sheer bloody commitment. It’s just that style can only carry a cartoon mouse so far. Still, when it works, it leaves you grinning like someone just pointed a camera your way and asked you to say, well, you know. Begins with C and ends with E.
Mouse: P.I. For Hire is out now on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC.
4/5
Author Bio
As a freelance journalist, Ryan Smith’s work is driven by a commitment to restoring what has long been absent from institutions meant to uphold truth and accountability: honesty and transparency. Alongside his analysis works on the life, career, trials and tribulations of Michael Jackson, whose unfair treatment over the years paved the way for the path he is on, Smith also dissects and examines popular culture, such as books, movies and video games, always aiming to shed light on what’s beneath the surface.