Mouse: PI for Employment Review: A Skilled Shooter Bursting with Cartoon Charm

Like any foolish hopeful gamer, I sat in the darkness of my home, starting a game that I prayed would be bright enough to live up to its promise. A black and white shooter set in a city full of rats? Classic cartoon style? A gumshoe noir plot? The idiosyncrasies stack up like Jenga blocks, and one flawed feature can send the entire tower tumbling down. But not so in Gamer City, where promising platforms are a dime a dozen, and few successfully pull off their boldest dreams.

Mouse: PI For Hire, the long-awaited indie shooter that came out of the post on X, is finally coming out on Thursday after years of trailers and teasers, and for the low price of $30 to boot. Although its creators at the Polish studio Fumi Games insist that the look of the game is largely inspired by the 1930’s “rubber hose” animation style popularized by Betty Boop and Fleischer cartoons, it is not difficult to see a visual resemblance to Steamboat Willie, the black and white character who preceded Mickey Mouse. A lot of Mouse: PI For Hire’s charm lies in the style of classic cartoon versus violent gunfights — and after playing half an hour of the game, that makes up for a lot of its charm.

But it’s a joy to find all the visual styles overlaying a well-entangled narrative full of 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 the beautiful community of Mouseburg to its back streets and a dangerous criminal underground, uncovering a larger conspiracy in the process.

Mouse: PI For Hire is filled to the brim with basics like a gumshoe character, a female love interest, political corruption, social inequality, dirty cops and a bulletin board where our detective fills in the case with clues. Despite the cartoonish animation and rubber-hose violence, noir is played straight; it is clear that this is a love letter to the genre of detective fiction popularized by American fiction writers.

In an interview with Fumi Games lead producer Maciej Krzemień last June at the Summer Game Fest, the team working on the game found inspiration in the stories of the famous noir writer Raymond Chandler, and the narrative directors did a lot of historical research to correct the time.

“Obviously, we’re not Americans ourselves. We wanted to get a good sense of this whole noir detective story style, but with things that are easy on it,” said Krzemień.

A good part of the success of Pepper’s character is that of his voice actor, Troy Baker, who delivers one-liners and exposition in strong tones equal to the hard-boiled detective recounting the case throughout the play. The rest of the voice cast is suitably good — Florian Clare as reporter Wanda Fuller, Frank Todaro as politician and Pepper’s war buddy Cornelius Stilton, among others — providing a range of period-appropriate performances from Mid-Atlantic faux-sophistication to streetwise accents from whatever New Jersey analogue they have near Mouseburg.

The dialogue is appropriately 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 long drags of smelly cheese to take the edge off, bootleggers are “cheeseleggers,” a gun modeled after a German Mauser rifle is named the Micer, and so on.

Even though the game’s soundtrack is a perfect mix of big band and jazzy tunes, Mouse: PI For Hire’s commitment to evoking the 1930s goes further. Layer optional filters on film characters and gauzy blurs on visuals, as well as degrade the sound quality of music so it sounds like it’s coming off vinyl or wax cylinders. The vintage look and feel is a fun addition to the immersion.

But Mouse: PI For Hire is a shooter first and foremost, and while its combat has more good than bad, there are enough challenges adapting its fun animation style to 3D shooting that it feels like a mixed bag.

Mouse: PI For Hire is more of a fun jaunt than a classic shooter

Mouse: PI For Hire feels very much like a modern version of the first wave of first-person shooters, like Doom and Duke Nukem: Enemies enter the room the player is in, shoot from a distance or close to enter. Like other so-called “Boomer shooters” released in recent years that evoke the thrill of old-school shooters with updated controls, the enemies do not have much dynamic movement, leading players to trade guns and switch to the right weapon at the moment.

Players get BioShock-like weapon upgrades, which range from shotguns, rifles and Thompson submachine guns to the funky Devarnisher gun that shoots globs of turpentine (a chemical old-school cartoonists used to erase ink) to melt enemies. There’s a lot in the later parts of the game, as well as launch improvements, that make guns more usable throughout the game.

Mouse: PI For Hire doesn’t try to be a first-person shooter, so it’s best to run into fire extinguishers and stationary enemies. The problem lies in combining the game’s visual style with the shooting action: Enemies look like they’re straight out of a cartoon, but their 2D animated bodies can be difficult to hit in 3D space. Often, as I’m roaming around, I’ll struggle to hit smaller enemies, and their hotbox can be a bit confusing, causing me to miss shots I thought I should have hit.

This isn’t a huge deal on easy and normal difficulty, which is very forgiving, but when I put it on hard mode (which you can do while flying), the punitive damage made my aim very uncertain in the matter. I tripped here and there trying to keep my bullets from falling on enemies — mostly the ones from afar.

While it’s a little confusing, it’s ultimately a small payoff for a well-designed experience. Mouse: PI For Hire is a period piece joyride, and as long as I treat rooms full of enemies and bosses as a fun element of the story, I’m not disappointed at all. Not every shooter needs to be the next Portal or Titanfall 2, reinventing the genre, especially games priced at $30 that can sit players for more than a dozen hours before they get credits.

What the game gets right is its dual commitment to its animation style and its complex world. I’ll never tire of watching the rubber band style animations of reloading guns or popping off enemies’ heads with close range gunfire in bursts of comical violence. It’s a fun companion to Mouseburg, a grim but believable town with all the characters and locations, power struggles and plot twists you’d find in any other noir.

At the beginning of the play, I followed a trail to the opera house where I thwarted an assassination attempt on a politician — albeit with a stage cannon that set the place on fire, and I had to fight a young singer dressed as Brunhilda to get out. A mix of gumshoe basics with cartoony logic makes Mouse: PI For Hire truly unique, and its Steamboat Willie looks hide that the game is deeper than it initially appears in its dedication to detective storytelling, with all the murky twists and turns of that genre.

“Without spoiling anything, there’s a big conspiracy behind it all, and it’s all serious in terms of social themes, the social themes of the play, and it reflects the political climate of the world back in the 1930s — and not just in America,” Krzemień told me last June.

So yes, a game where not Mickey Mouse gets a gun, but all in the service of uncovering a mystery, fighting the growing fascist threat and hoping to get enough cheddar to pay his debts.

Mouse: PI for Hire comes out on April 16 for PC, Xbox One X/S, PS5 and Nintendo Switch 2.