© ROOT-NATION.com - Use of content is permitted with a backlink.
Warsaw’s Fumi Games spent years building something that sounds like a novelty – a rubber hose-animated, black-and-white, 1930s-inspired first-person shooter – and then shipped it in April for $29.99 as if that were the most normal thing in the world. Launched April 16 across PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch 2, Mouse: P.I. for Hire pulled 730,000 copies sold in its first weeks, recouping its publisher’s total investment in the process. That’s not a fluke. That’s a game people actually wanted.
You play as Jack Pepper, a private investigator voiced by Troy Baker, navigating the fictional city of Mouseburg in 1934. Society is still recovering from the Great War. Political tensions are pulled tight, xenophobic sentiment toward the city’s shrew population is on the rise, gangsters masquerading as police officers are roaming the streets, and starlets are mysteriously disappearing in Tinsel Ave. It’s an authentically noir setup – pulpy, clichéd by design, and executed with enough self-awareness to stay funny without ever becoming embarrassing. The script leans hard into cheese puns, and somehow you let it.
Over the course of the game, Jack is approached about three distinct cases, which end up being connected in ways the opening hour doesn’t telegraph. The detective structure isn’t demanding – clues are pinned to an evidence board, and you click through them to unlock new levels rather than piece anything together yourself – but there’s also a lock-picking mini-game where Jack uses his tail to maneuver cylinders into position, and a turn-based card game at the downtown bar that ends up being more compelling than it has any right to be. Fumi isn’t trying to be Disco Elysium. What they’ve built instead is something closer to a theme park ride through a genre – confident, propulsive, and constantly entertaining.
The shooting is the real thing. Mouse plays like a classic id Software FPS: no aiming down sights, a deliberate focus on high-speed movement, and an emphasis on firing from the hip while arenas full of enemies swarm your position. The opening hour is the game’s weakest moment – Jack’s initial pistol feels light, movement is limited, and the combat doesn’t click yet. Push past it. The arsenal grows at a satisfying pace: double jumps, wall runs, grappling hooks, and a helicopter tail propeller that lets Jack glide between elevated positions gradually open up the level design in ways that reward exploration rather than punish it. Weapon upgrades sit in Tammy’s workshop back at the hub, and consumable power-ups scattered through levels add a cartoonish layer to the combat – eating spinach briefly transforms Jack into a Popeye-style brawler, coffee activates rapid-fire finger guns, chili peppers add fire damage, and cheese refills health. None of it is subtle, and that’s entirely correct.
The visuals are astonishing. The 3D world is inhabited by 2D hand-drawn characters who constantly adjust so they’re always facing you straight on. The effect sounds disorienting in description but feels completely natural in practice – Fumi has found a visual language for a world that genuinely looks like it was pulled out of a 1930s projection booth. There’s no color. There doesn’t need to be. The film grain aesthetic adds a layer of period texture, and the black-and-white palette pops in ways that a color game simply couldn’t achieve. Every frame feels authored.
Then there’s the music. Composer Patryk Scelina recorded the soundtrack live across sessions in both Georgia and Poland, and the result is a 20-track big band score that doesn’t just accompany the action – it participates in it. Scelina wrote on Bandcamp about approaching the music “like an old film-noir detective tale,” rooting it in big band swing while pulling it through the full range of the genre. Parisian electro-swing group Caravan Palace contributed an exclusive track, “Good Mouse,” written specifically for the game – and it’s genuinely one of the best things you’ll hear in a video game this year.
Troy Baker holds the record for the most acting nominations at the BAFTA Games Awards, with seven between 2013 and 2026. Jack Pepper is a former war hero turned private investigator who takes the city’s smallest, cheapest cases just to stay afloat until one job pulls the thread that unravels everything wrong with Mouseburg. Baker plays him as a classic hardboiled cliché delivered with perfect commitment – and when the game leans into its absurdity, his delivery carries scenes that could have collapsed under their own silliness.
The detective mechanics will disappoint players who came looking for a puzzle game, and the enemy variety thins in the back half. The central gameplay loop takes a minute to spin up, and that opening level makes a rough first impression. These are real limitations. They are also the right size for what Fumi built – a lean, distinctive action game that knows exactly what it is and refuses to overstay its welcome.
Verdict
Mouse: P.I. for Hire is the kind of game that gets made once a generation, if that – a completely committed aesthetic vision that somehow also works as a shooter. Fumi Games, a studio out of Warsaw with no major releases behind them, built a 1930s rubber hose cartoon from the ground up, frame by frame, and then put a boomer shooter inside it. The result is twelve hours of Jack Pepper grappling across Mouseburg to a live big band score while Troy Baker delivers hardboiled mouse puns with complete sincerity, and it never stops being exactly as good as that sounds. The detective mechanics are shallow, Performance mode on Switch 2 needs a patch, and the first hour undersells the combat by a significant margin – but none of that matters much when the back half is this confident, this fluid, and this visually assured. At $29.99, it’s one of the best arguments for the indie FPS in years.