Mouse: P.I. for Hire |

Publisher: PlaySide Studios

Developer: Fumi Games

Release Date: 04/16/2026

Available On

1940s cartoons have slowly grown in popularity, but especially their art style due to copyrights running out mostly from Disney. This had led to many horror projects or inspirations from these shows (Bendy, Cuphead). Mostly stemming from Steamboat Willy and his ilk, Mouse: P.I. for Hire doesn’t just take inspirations from the cartoon era it replicates but also other first-person games like Doom. Mouse is a first-person shooter that is very similar to the first two Doom games with some obvious elements of the newer reboots. First and foremost, P.I. for Hire is a fantastic game to look at. It’s not easy to make a black-and-white game due to the lack of colours that are used to give visual clues to gamers. Clearly the developers used white on black contrast to deliver basic video game language to players, and that’s quite tricky.

While I would love to say that Mouse is a fantastic Doom clone and is basically Doom: Steamboat Willy Edition, there are some glaring issues that kept this game from greatness. While the shooting mechanics feel really good and every gun has it’s own purpose and style there are some balancing issues with Mouse. You start out with the Mouser (haha), which is a semi-automatic pistol, and that’s totally fine. However, you get stuck with this single weapon for way too long. In fact, the weapons are spread so far apart it makes you want to stick with just a single gun. Like the newer Doom reboots, there are tons of pickups in every area. You rarely run out of ammo, so this doesn’t encourage mixing things up. That goes hand in hand with enemy design. Doom has a very distincft design that forces you to switch weapons for different enemies and their distance. Mouse desperately wants to be a close-quarters arena-style shooter, but these areas just aren’t big enough. There also isn’t enough multi-layering to give you breathing room or strategies. Most levels all play out exactly the same, which is multiple corridors bookended by an area with monster closets and almost no verticality. Some act as hubs, and as you come back around throughout the level, more monster closets will open, but this becomes very tedious.

There is a main hub that has your office where you pin clues you find in each level. You can also upgrade weapons with found blueprints and buy ammo and collectibles as well as play a baseball card-style poker game, which I didn’t find very interesting or fun to play. Maybe because I’m not a baseball fan. Money is accumulated incredibly slowly, so you have to be mindful about what you buy. If you don’t care about collectibles, you only use it to buy ammo so you’re stocked up before each mission. I wish there were more uses for money; again, this is part of the balancing issues in this game. When you upgrade weapons (up to three times), you get a cool visual added to the weapon but also a secondary fire option which harkens back to Resistance or Ratchet & Clank, but they aren’t as clever. The shotgun lets you charge up a double shot; the double-barrel shotgun lets you fire both barrels; the James Gun lets you shoot a burst of ammo; the mouser lets you do 3-round bursts. It’s not very diversified, and despite the amount of weapons you get, there are still more balancing problems with these. The pump-action shotgun and double barrel are mostly repetitive. The double-barrel is slow to reload and doesn’t let you carry much (12 rounds), and there are no long-distance weapons. Everything is short- to medium-range, but there are no long-range areas. There is only one explosive weapon (cannon) and one throwable (TNT), which make another pair of weapons repetitive. The brain gun is fun but doesn’t do much outside of exploding heads but requires constant contact. There’s a freeze gun, which I didn’t find useful, as it only freezes one enemy at a time and takes too long. I can go on.

I mostly stuck to the pump-action shotgun and the James gun, as those two complemented each other. Close-quarters damage and being able to shoot many enemies at once. I rarely touched the Mouser after unlocking those two. There’s a paint gun that does a bit more damage, but what I wanted were weapons that do splash damage or another type of fast-firing weapon. The enemies also always repeat. There are enemies with shields, melee enemies, big melee guys that take a lot of damage, and flying enemies, and that’s about it. This gets old really fast as there are nearly 15 levels in the game. Many levels look the same, with several set in swamps, warehouses, movie lots, etc. With everything being black and white, I wanted to see more diversity in scenery. You can unlock passive abilities like hovering, double jump, wall run and climb, but these are rarely used and felt like afterthoughts. There are no puzzles in the game either. The only puzzle is technically tail-picking, which is a nice change from The Elder Scrolls style of lock-picking. This consists of pins and a maze-style lock. You have to push the pins while moving through the maze. Some are timed and some have hazards, while others have limited moves. The problem is that once you do a few, they are all the same with zero challenge. This compels you to skip optional safes and doors in order to progress.

That’s what you will do through most of Mouse. Moving forward just to get to the next thing. The story is mildly interesting, but poorly told. It feels very disjointed, and half of the time I don’t know what was going on. There are multiple cases going on at once, and a lot of them cross over. There are typical noir-type stereotypes in the game, and they just were not clever or interesting. The voice acting is good, and I like some of the mouse-related puns, like ‘fondue’ being alcohol and ‘cheese powder’ being drugs. The boss fights are probably more interesting, but the final boss fight is an absolute pain due to the cramped arena with not enough room to move around. Despite all of this, the game is fast-paced, and I did enjoy just shooting everything in sight. That feeling from Doom does come across in the game, but the only truly interesting area was the “hallucination” level in which you jump around a fantasy area and go to hell and find the chainsaw. Most of Mouse’s problem is that it takes itself way too seriously.

The rubber hose animations and art style are fantastic to look at, and the game feels good to play. The weapons are great to shoot, but the levels feel way too similar to each other, and many of the game types of areas repeat. There’s no deviation in design, and the same few enemies repeat forever. There are no puzzles, and tail-picking becomes easy way too quickly. Passive abilities aren’t used much, and the weapons are poorly balanced with both alt-fire modes and overall use against enemies. Many weapons serve the same function, causing you to stick to the same few throughout. That doesn’t make the game unenjoyable, just repetitive, and many players may quit early on. The story isn’t very interesting and the characters are dull, but it’s still a great shooter at its heart, and I kept blasting my way through the game, having fun despite how serious the game took itself.