I went back to level six during my MOUSE: P.I. For Hire review playthrough — not because I'd missed something, but because the speakeasy's ambient jazz shifts when you enter combat, and I wanted to hear that transition again without twelve cartoon mice shooting at me.
That's what kind of game this is. Specific in its pleasures. You're a mouse detective named Jack Pepper working a murder conspiracy across twenty-plus levels of Mouseburg, a noir city drawn entirely in hand-drawn rubber hose animation. Fumi Games, a Melbourne-based studio, released it on April 16, 2026 through PlaySide. One week post-launch: 4,524 Steam reviews. Ninety-five percent positive.
I'll confirm: the reviews are mostly right.
Key Takeaways
- Released: April 16, 2026 on PC (Steam)
- Developer: Fumi Games / Publisher: PlaySide
- Price: ~$15 USD (Digital Deluxe Edition also available)
- Playtime: 8–12 hours main campaign; 15+ for full completion
- Genre: First-person boomer shooter with Metroidvania traversal elements
- Scope: 20+ levels, 10+ weapons, original jazz/big band score, 34 Steam Achievements
Overview
Fumi Games doesn't have a long back catalogue. MOUSE: P.I. For Hire suggests that might be a strategic advantage — the team committed to a premise and built everything around it rather than hedging.
The premise: a 1930s noir detective story rendered entirely in hand-drawn rubber hose animation, played as a fast FPS with Metroidvania traversal elements layered in across the campaign. Jack Pepper is your protagonist. Mouseburg is your city. The conspiracy you're unraveling doesn't break narrative ground, but the game isn't trying to. The story gives the levels context and the player a reason to care about which mouse is the actual villain.
The style is the point. Rubber hose animation — the wobbly, limb-stretching aesthetic of early Fleischer cartoons — is applied to every enemy, environment, and weapon in the game. The animation frame rate is deliberately choppy. It looks like a cartoon projected at 18 frames per second. The gunplay runs at whatever your monitor supports.
That contrast is what the game is built on, and it holds. More importantly: it holds across all twenty-plus levels. Visual consistency at this scale is harder than it looks. Most games with distinctive art directions start cracks showing around the third act. MOUSE doesn't. The palette and line weight are as cohesive in the final levels as in the first. That took discipline.
109 Steam curators had reviewed the game by one week post-launch. For a studio without a prior track record, that's notable enough to mention without overstating.
Gameplay
Discussion of the MOUSE: P.I. For Hire review coverage online focuses almost entirely on the art direction. That's understandable. But it undersells how solid the FPS mechanics are beneath it.
The core loop is: move fast, aim at things wearing mobster hats, don't stand still. Health doesn't regenerate. Resources reward aggressive play. If you've spent time with 1990s-era PC shooters, the movement language is immediately legible. If you haven't, the tutorial is brief, purposeful, and then gets out of the way. (That last part — getting out of the way — is a meaningful design choice that too many games in this genre skip.)
Ten-plus weapon types appear across the campaign. These are not stat reskins dressed differently. The tommy gun handles differently than the revolver. The revolver handles differently than the game's cartoon-logic equivalent of a shotgun, which fires in ways that are initially surprising and eventually become part of your toolkit. Each weapon has a visual personality consistent with the 1930s setting, and you're identifying them quickly in the middle of fights, which means that visual legibility matters functionally and not just aesthetically.
Unlockable movement abilities layer in as you progress. Wall-jumps, slides, and additional traversal options appear as campaign rewards, not prerequisites. Early game you can play fairly flat. By hour six, the movement set has expanded enough that revisiting earlier areas — which the game doesn't require but permits — reveals shortcuts and routes that weren't accessible before. It's modest Metroidvania implementation. If you're after the depth of dedicated Metroidvanias like the ones in our best indie games under $20 guide, this isn't that. But the system earns its place.
Where MOUSE stumbles is in its launch state. The post-release hotfixes addressed stuck geometry, missing NPCs, and broken quest triggers — all issues I encountered before those patches. None of them derailed the experience. But they were present. The game runs cleanly on recommended hardware post-patch; the 12GB RAM minimum is a raised eyebrow for a stylized FPS at this price point, and players on lower-spec machines should verify compatibility.
The comparison that keeps coming up is stylized indie action more broadly. If you've played REPLACED, which executed a distinctive cyberpunk 2.5D visual identity across its full campaign, you'll recognize the discipline MOUSE exercises. Both games demonstrate that a strong art direction requires something behind it to function — and both deliver. For an example of a game that found the same gimmick-to-gameplay ratio trickier, our Saint Slayer review covers a game that understood its aesthetic better than its pacing. MOUSE doesn't have that problem.
Atmosphere and Audio
The soundtrack is doing real work here, not decorative work.
Fumi Games commissioned an original jazz and big band score. Whether that was a luxury or a necessity depends on how seriously you take the premise. The Mouseburg setting requires it — a stock action score would undermine the entire art direction immediately. The more interesting question is whether the execution holds up. It does.
The music is dynamic. It shifts when combat starts. It transitions back when combat ends. In specific levels — the speakeasy is the most obvious, but there are others — the ambient track and combat track share melodic material in ways that don't feel like two loops running at different tempos. That's harder to execute than it sounds, and it's often the first thing cut when studios run over budget. It wasn't cut here.
The hand-drawn environments across twenty-plus levels stay distinct. Interior speakeasies, rain-slicked street exteriors, rooftop chase sequences — each has a recognizable silhouette. Palette shifts level-to-level signal progression without announcing it. You notice you're deeper in Mouseburg without being told.
And: the tommy gun sounds different in the speakeasy than it does in the warehouse. Either that's deliberate acoustic design or I imagined it because the visual context primed me to expect it. Either way, it worked.
Verdict
MOUSE: P.I. For Hire is a complete game that knows what it is. The FPS mechanics are solid. The art direction is the most committed visual identity I've seen in an indie shooter at this price point. The dynamic audio earns its budget. The story is functional and doesn't inflate its runtime.
The launch-day bugs were a real problem. Any review written before the hotfixes would reasonably score the game lower. Post-patch, the experience is clean enough that I stopped thinking about them.
Buy it if you have any interest in either the aesthetic or the genre. The two are combined better here than in most games attempting the same combination. Skip it if you require health regeneration, granular difficulty settings, or a story that goes somewhere unexpected — none of those are available.
Rating: 8.5/10
Frequently Asked Questions
How long is MOUSE: P.I. For Hire? The main campaign runs 8 to 12 hours across 20+ levels, depending on how much of Mouseburg you explore. Completionists going for all 34 Steam Achievements or revisiting earlier areas with the full movement set can push that to 15 hours or beyond.
Does MOUSE: P.I. For Hire have controller support? The Steam store page doesn't list controller support as a featured option. The game is built for mouse-and-keyboard input, which suits the FPS mechanics. Check the Steam page for updated compatibility information before purchasing on controller.
Is MOUSE: P.I. For Hire worth the price? At approximately $15 USD, the runtime and the quality of the hand-drawn animation make it competitive. The Digital Deluxe Edition is also available. For the genre and price bracket, it delivers what it promises.
What genre is MOUSE: P.I. For Hire? A first-person boomer shooter — no regenerating health, fast movement, aggressive resource design. Metroidvania traversal mechanics layer in across the campaign, but the core is an FPS, not an exploration game.
Is MOUSE: P.I. For Hire difficult? Moderate. Early levels are designed to be learned without prior genre experience. Later levels reward players who've internalized the movement system. No difficulty slider is listed.
Does MOUSE: P.I. For Hire have a story? Yes — a noir detective narrative following P.I. Jack Pepper through a conspiracy in Mouseburg. It's tagged 'Story Rich' on Steam. The narrative has a proper arc and resolution; it exists to give the levels momentum, and it does that without pretending to be more than it is.
References
- MOUSE: P.I. For Hire on Steam — Overwhelmingly Positive, 4,524 reviews at time of writing (April 22, 2026)
- Fumi Games official site — developer site with trailer and media assets
- PlaySide Publishing — publisher page; PlaySide has published a range of mid-tier and indie titles
