There's more to Mouse: PI for Hire than cartoon violence
Mouse: PI for Hire is a lot deeper than I initially assumed. When the game first caught buzz in May 2023 with an early teaser populated by placeholder assets, I didn’t understand the hype. The art style was definitely cool — Mouse is a black-and-white first-person shooter inspired by 1930s rubber hose cartoons, featuring bipedal rodents dressed like mobsters — but without any information about the gameplay loop, mechanics or narrative direction, I remained unmoved.
After seeing Mouse in action at Summer Game Fest 2025, consider me movin’. Mouse is mechanically nuanced and fully voice-acted, starring Troy Baker as the protagonist, and it has more to offer than shock-value cartoon violence. This is a clue-gathering, photo-snapping, girlfriend-avenging, noir detective simulator that happens to star a bunch of slick-talking mice and rats, and I’m fully into it.
In a private session at SGF, Fumi Games CEO Mateusz Michalak and lead producer Maciek Krzemien played through the game’s third level, Gumshoe in the Opera, and discussed their intentions with the game. Krzemien said the team didn’t want to simply lean on the art style at the expense of gameplay, and they focused on building a rich world with layered mechanics. Since that initial teaser came out, they’ve been fleshing out characters, drawing assets by hand, implementing puzzles and secrets, and tweaking individual weapons so that they feel just right.
In Gumshoe in the Opera, the protagonist Jack Pepper is investigating his girlfriend’s murder and he’s backstage at the theater, looking for a friend who might be involved. Baker makes for a fine 1930s private eye, with a deep voice and a Boardwalk Empire twang. The supporting characters are voiced, too, and they tend to have a higher-pitched, henchman style of gangster speak. Mousey, you could say.
Pepper fills up a 16-slot weapon wheel as he finds new guns and tools, including a flashlight, dynamite, Tommy gun, hookshot, pistol, shotgun and a turpentine blaster. The turpentine gun is ridiculous in the best way — since the characters in this world are cartoons, it melts their skin away like it’s paint and then dissolves their skeletons. Killing enemies with a traditional gun leaves them lying in pools of black blood, sometimes with missing heads, and the game’s environments have destructible elements. The mix of mature violence and classic cartoon art is strangely joyful, and it seems Fumi got the balance just right.
PlaySide
Most enemies in Mouse take a few hits before going down, but headshots are a thing and a well-aimed blast can definitely flatten a mobster (mouse-ster?) in one blow. I didn’t get a chance to play the game myself, but now that I’m fully seated on the Mouse hype train, I’m curious to feel the gunplay firsthand. I have a sense it’s going to be more difficult than Krzemien made it seem.
The preview was roughly half shooting action, half investigation and exploring. When he’s not in a firefight, Pepper climbs through vents and sneaks around backstage, collecting corked health pots, a coffee cup and weapons along the way. The coffee cup turns Pepper’s hand into a finger gun, which he uses to rapidly pew pew pew his way through enemies. He learns how to double-jump and is able to backtrack through the level with this new ability, picking up additional supplies and a hidden trading card — for the card-based minigame, of course. A lockpick mechanic has players snake their way past spikes to complete a small maze inside the lock. In one moment, Pepper takes a photo of someone through a small window and it’s stored for later, hinting at a larger clue-organizing mechanic. Krzemien said that after this section, Pepper will return to his office to piece together the evidence.
There are a lot of layers to Mouse: PI for Hire. Maybe it’s my fault for being surprised by the depth in this game or the care being shown by developers at Fumi, but at least now, I finally get it. Mouse is due to hit Steam, PlayStation 4, PS5, Xbox Series X/S and Switch this year, published by PlaySide.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/theres-more-to-mouse-pi-for-hire-than-cartoon-violence-203044404.html?src=rss