What happens when you throw a boomer shooter into a blender with BioShock influences and a 1930s rubber-hose cartoon? You get Mouse: P.I. For Hire — the most visually distinctive, conceptually committed debut in recent indie memory — and it launched April 16 to the kind of reviews that debut studios dream about.
Fumi Games, a small studio with no prior commercial releases, built something that shouldn't exist. The entire game is rendered in hand-drawn 2D rubber-hose animation, the same visual style as the earliest Mickey Mouse and Felix the Cat cartoons from the late 1920s. Black and white. Exaggerated, stretchy proportions. Characters whose faces fold into expressions that don't obey the laws of anatomy. Applied to a first-person shooter with fast, demanding combat, the effect is genuinely jaw-dropping — a technical achievement dressed up as an aesthetic choice, executed with a consistency that never wavers across the entire runtime.
You play as Jack Pepper, a mouse private investigator voiced by Troy Baker, working cases in the corrupt city of Mouseburg. The setting is a 1930s American city populated entirely by anthropomorphic animals — gangsters, corrupt politicians, femmes fatales, beat cops on the take. The narrative leans into classic noir beats: the mysterious client, the case that goes deeper than it first appears, the revelation that the real corruption runs to the top. It's not the most original story in the world, and the detective narrative elements are the one area where critics agree the game falls short of the combat — but it sets the scene competently and gives you enough reason to keep moving through Mouseburg's grimy streets.
The arsenal is the star of the show alongside the visuals. Every weapon feels period-accurate and tactilely satisfying: revolvers with satisfying cylinder clicks, tommy guns that burn through ammo with cartoon abandon, Carcano rifles for the moments requiring precision, dynamite bundles for the moments requiring none. The Fantastic-o-Matic vending machine system — scattered throughout levels and offering randomized power-up combinations — adds significant replayability and encourages different approaches to the same combat encounters across multiple playthroughs. It's the BioShock Plasmid comparison the game keeps earning in reviews, applied to a setting those games would never have imagined.