Let’s be honest about why you clicked on this. It’s the way MOUSE: P.I. For Hire looks. A first-person shooter rendered entirely as a 1930s rubber-hose cartoon — all squashing, stretching limbs and inky black-and-white — is the kind of concept that stops your thumb mid-scroll. The good news, and the slightly surprising news, is that there’s a genuinely good shooter holding up all that style. The better news is that the style is even more of a triumph than the trailers let on.
This is the debut game from Fumi Games, published by PlaySide Studios, and it’s been a long road here. The project first went viral back in 2024, and the hype has only compounded through years of trailers and delays. So the question hanging over it was always the same one that sinks so many style-forward indies: is there anything underneath the gorgeous surface? Mostly, yes — and where it stumbles, it’s never because of a lack of care.
The best-looking game you’ll play this year
I don’t say that lightly. Fumi built the game in Unity, blending fully 3D environments with 2D hand-drawn character and weapon sprites, and as far as I can tell that specific combination is unique. Cuphead is still the reigning champion of rubber-hose animation in games, but MOUSE has absolutely entered the conversation — some would argue it takes the crown outright. Every element has care poured into it: the way shotgun shells get jammed into a gun with reckless speed, the (genuinely horrifying) death animations, the little standee-style character models, the cartoon cutscenes. Enemies burst apart in fountains of inky-black blood, and there’s something delightfully disconcerting about gore this grisly wearing such a family-friendly coat.
What impressed me even more than the effect itself is how readable it all stays. Combat here is fast and multi-layered, and it’s a real feat of design that you can glance at a chaotic arena and instantly parse enemy types, environmental hazards, ammo and health pickups, all in monochrome. Where most level designers lean on coloured lights to steer your eye, MOUSE uses space and clean floorplans to keep you pushing forward. You can adjust the amount of noir film-flicker on screen too, a lovely touch. There are occasional frame drops and a bit of texture flickering, but these are minor blemishes on a strikingly polished package.
It shoots like a boomer, and that’s the point
If you’ve played Doom Eternal, you’ll click with the rhythm immediately. MOUSE keeps you moving — standing still gets you killed. Enemies pressure you constantly, and the game consistently rewards using the environment over just the guns in your hands. That zippy boomer-shooter speed is married to a bunch of alt-fire options, environmental attacks, and movement tools that let you genuinely dance around the busier arenas, picking off targets with real flow. The fundamentals feel tight, and the gunplay honestly gets better and better the deeper you go.
There’s a metroidvania streak running through it, too. You’ll revisit earlier levels kitted out with new traversal abilities, often finding them in a different state than you left them. And between missions, Jack returns to a hub area, Dishonored-style, to catch up with characters at his office or the dive bar across the street. These interstitials became a highlight for me — pinning clues to my office board, chatting with Wanda the freelance journalist, and (this turned into an obsession) playing a simple baseball card game at the bar. It’s high-card-wins stuff and it won’t keep Gwent designers up at night, but it hooked me hard enough that I was driving around every roadhouse on the world map hunting for high-power pitchers to buy.
Jack Pepper and a world worth visiting
A lot of MOUSE’s charm rides on its protagonist, and Troy Baker is worth every penny here. Jack Pepper’s hard-nosed detective voice is magnificent, the perfect foreground for the noir backdrop, and the supporting cast pull their weight across a script that’s genuinely, frequently funny — even if it does lean on more cheese and mouse puns than any human should be legally allowed to write. Fumi clearly loves its noir tropes and plays with them on purpose: the femme fatale, the cynical journalist, the hardened bartender all show up as affectionate nods rather than lazy defaults.
Mouseburg itself is the real star, though. Fumi keeps things fresh by hauling you across wildly varied locations — an opulent opera house, a gangster-infested steamboat, a spooky laboratory, a swampy cheeselegging hideout, a western movie set, seaside docks. Plants have faces. Spiders wear shoes. Slugs dance. There’s a stop-and-stare moment in nearly every level. And underneath the slapstick, there’s more thematic ambition than you’d expect: the game’s shrews occupy a lower social tier than mice, and MOUSE uses that to draw pointed parallels with real historical oppression, police corruption, and where political extremism can lead. It’s not subtle in the slightest, but it gives the caper a bit of weight.
Where the cheese gets a little holey
MOUSE isn’t flawless, and it’s worth being clear-eyed about that. Here’s the quick breakdown:
What works: A genuinely unique, jaw-dropping art style. Tight, satisfying gunplay that improves as it goes. Outstanding voice work led by Troy Baker. A varied, characterful world with a terrific jazz soundtrack. Fun mini-games and smart hub-world downtime.
What doesn’t: The pacing is uneven, and the plot — for all its ambition — never quite coalesces, rushing its final act. It’s very easy, even on the hardest difficulty; ammo and health are so plentiful that there’s little reason to switch weapons tactically, and a few overpowered guns can carry you through most of the campaign. Enemy variety thins out toward the end, and a couple of late encounters spike in difficulty without much warning.
None of this is fatal. But it’s the difference between “a stone-cold classic” and “a hugely enjoyable, gorgeous shooter with a few rough edges.” If you come in expecting a real deduction game to scratch that L.A. Noire itch, you’ll be let down — this is a fast, stylish Doom-descendant wearing a detective’s trench coat, and it’s much happier being that.
A debut that makes you hungry for the sequel
Here’s the thing that lingers after the credits: MOUSE: P.I. For Hire is the kind of first game that makes you desperate to see what the studio does next. For Fumi Games to swing this hard — a genre mash-up nobody asked for, executed with this much confidence — and largely connect on their very first try is close to miraculous. The rough edges read less like carelessness and more like a young team still learning where to spend their polish.
What they’ve delivered is a premium, ingenious game in an indie package: one of the most distinctive visual identities in years, bolted onto gunplay good enough to stand on its own two feet. I spent my whole time in Mouseburg grinning, giving villains what-for and cracking cases the old-fashioned way. If there’s any justice, this won’t be the last we see of Jack Pepper — and I’ll be first in line for the next case.
