Mouse: P.I for Hire is a Noir Gem

Mouse: PI for Hire is not trying to reinvent the shooter. It’s not even the best shooter in recent years. It’s certainly no Doom. However, it is trying to dress one up in the best Halloween costume you’ve ever seen, then dare you to care about anything else. For the most part, it works.

Set in a world ripped straight from the fever dream of a 1930s Disney animator, Mouse puts you in the shoes of a wisecracking detective mouse, voiced by Troy Baker (The Last of Us), navigating a world of gangsters, dames, and dark alleys. If you’ve ever watched a Steamboat Willie-era cartoon and thought, “cool, but what if that, but with guns,” then congratulations, this was made specifically for you.

Note: You can listen to my first impressions of Mouse: P.I. for Hire on the Day Zero podcast.

Mouse: P.I.for Hire is a linear game, which lets developer Fumi Games commit to adding to its world with the fullest details. The black and white visuals are layered with different film grain passes and post-process effects that are very much the work of people genuinely obsessed with the era they’re imitating. It would have been easy to have this look like a gimmick, but the work put into the audio design makes the world come alive. The EQ has been tuned to mimic the scratched-out quality of a record player. Every piece of dialogue, gunshot sound effect, everything sounds period-accurate. You can tune these effects individually to an extent, but the developers don’t use “accessibility” as an excuse to completely tear down their vision, unlike something like Spider-Noir.

Baker has plenty to work with here, inspired by many of the greats in the noir genre. Sure, sometimes it comes across as an imitation, but it didn’t take long before I got completely immersed in its world. Mouse also has a surprising amount of story tucked inside its runtime. The nearly 12-hour-long game has you navigating a narrative full of mystery and backstabbing.

Where Mouse falls short is in the gameplay itself, but that’s not the worst thing. Strip the visuals away, and you have a competent but familiar shooter. The mechanics don’t do anything you haven’t seen before, in a game that looked considerably less interesting. It’s polished enough that it never feels like a chore, but the gunplay exists largely to ferry you between the game’s real highlights: its world, its style, and its story.

That’s not necessarily a knock. If Mouse had mediocre art and this same gameplay, it’d be forgettable. With the art? It’s a damn good time.

Mouse: P.I. for Hire PC Performance

Most of my playtime in Mouse was on my Steam Deck. Thanks to its low-fidelity, artist-driven style, the game runs wonderfully on the handheld. The launch version had issues running at 40fps, and 30fps felt a little too low for a shooter. However, since the game’s release, a major update improved performance, and locking to 45fps was possible.

Of course, on my PC with an RTX 5070, the game ran smoother than butter. 4K at 60fps on the highest settings? No biggie.

Verdict

Mouse: P.I. for Hire builds an authentic representation of 1930s Disney cartoons and noir films, and for the most part, it’s enough for it to be enjoyable.