Mouse PI For Rent: The Child of Doom and Cuphead! We Love the Idea

I want to give Mouse PI For Hire my confidence. I like to think that this game, born from fan art on Bioshock, generated by word of mouth, product of the positive side of the web and virality, can really come to fruition, and can do so with the best possibilities of the small team Fumi Games. It must be said that the aspirations are anything but moderate. Perhaps they are even a little too high. The first prototype of a “simple” FPS (modeled on the artistic and graphic styles of the rubber hose animation technique, made famous by the cartoons of the 30s) has given way to a hybrid between a shooter and a metroidvania, with a touch of immersive sim.

“In a comment from a user a few months ago,” the development studio told me during its presentation at Gamescom 2024, “we read that Mouse is the son of Doom and Cuphead. We were quite amused by this definition and we think it conveys the idea well, even though in reality there is much more to our game.”

Hard-boiled with topi

Creating something new, bringing a breath of fresh air to the FPS genre: that is the goal of Fumi Games. We would like to wish the authors “good luck” with all our hearts, also because we see in their eyes and in their words an immense and enthusiastic passion for the project. This sincere love for their work is always a vehicle of strong empathy.

In the case of Mouse, the idea behind the project is so captivating that it strongly fuels the hope that everything will go well during development. We must thank artists like Ub Iwerks and Max Fleischer, if Mouse exists today: as Disney clearly did, it was their work that served as inspiration for Mouse’s style. We therefore find drawings in a beautiful black and white, with characters and objects (even guns!) soft as a “rubber tube”, in a constant bouncing effect that dances to the rhythm of Jazz. At first glance, it seems like you’re watching a wonderful vintage short film, this time interactive. Mouse PI For Hire is essentially a playable hardboiled animated film and follows all the classic stylistic features of the genre. The city of Mouseburg, in the America of the thirties, is certainly not Mousetown, even if it is only inhabited by mice: it is rather a melting pot of problems and crimes of all kinds, badly damaged after one of those bad economic crises that the underworld takes advantage of to assert its dominion.

Jack Pepper, a veteran, ex-cop, with a rough but honest character and a gambling addiction, is responsible for defeating the gangster gangs. Yes: the prototype of the detective from noir cinema and literature. Alongside him, as tradition dictates, there is a “femme fatale”, who goes by the name of Tammy Tumbler, an orphan with incredible skills as a mechanic.

She won’t be a playable character, but she will prove essential to Jack’s investigations, as the investigator will often turn to her to upgrade his equipment. So Mouse’s style isn’t just an end in itself. The game is essentially a narrative experience that aims to tackle serious and challenging topics, such as racial segregation, poverty, and political extremism, and mixes them with darkly humorous tones. In order to stay on the subject of the narrative, the story will be divided into three endings, which will apparently depend on the actions taken by the player rather than the choices made during dialogues.

Style, sounds, inspiration

When Fumi Games launched the demo, clearly in an embryonic state and with artificial intelligence patterns not yet implemented, the artistic approach left me speechless, to be honest. It is beautiful to see Mouse in motion, and everything is done by hand, drawing after drawing, with a high level of attention to detail. The levels of expertise admired in Cuphead have not yet been reached (at least not yet…), but the result is already very characteristic in its current state. The contrast between the 2D characters and the three-dimensional background has given the authors, who have long been racking their brains to figure out how to make everything as homogeneous as possible, quite a headache.

Even painting everything in black and white was a tough challenge to overcome. The color palette and shades used, along with the good work on the level design, allowed the team to create readable and walkable environments. The studio wants the player to have the tools to understand where he is going at all times, without feeling disoriented by locations that are difficult to understand just because of artistic whims. Fumi Games wants Mouse to have a Super Mario World-style map that connects the game levels, each of which has a variable size. Once we have acquired an additional ability, including, for example, the ability to stay in the air for a few seconds with our ears as if they were the blades of a helicopter, we can return to the paintings we have already visited and explore previously inaccessible areas, where we can complete investigations, or collect other clues, or even obtain new weapons.

Here you can feel the Metroidvania vibe mentioned at the beginning, alongside the light, immersive sim component. In the larger areas, more varied approaches are allowed: Jack can float using the aforementioned ears, or use his tail as a grappling hook, run on walls like the Prince of Persia would do and, in particular, riddle those cheap gangster mice with bullets. The slaughter of the criminal rodents is accompanied by a very tasty sound department, where effects and filters have been applied that pollute the audio to the point of aging it and giving the impression that it comes from turntables from a century ago: a brilliant idea suggested to the team by a member of the Mouse community. It is wonderful when the players themselves contribute to the creation of a work.

Save, Jack!

Metroidvania and immersive sim ambitions aside, Mouse is an FPS first and foremost, and as such, shooting phases are the linchpin of its gameplay. I haven’t played it myself, so I can’t speak to the quality of the gunplay, nor the feedback provided by the springy weapons Jack can wield, but it’s a joy to watch.

The demo I visited was – by Fumi Games’ own admission – little more than an interactive testbed for the core gameplay mechanics, with incomplete areas, not very aggressive enemies, and an AI with basic behaviors. The authors want to emphasize that they are constantly working on adapting, perfecting, and enriching their creature day after day, which is expected to happen in 2025.

As it stands, Mouse PI For Hire presents itself as a winning idea, but perhaps a little too ambitious: far from the canons of traditional FPS, it seeks in the visual and sound style, as well as in the mix of genres, the weapon with which to conquer a place in the market. However, it will first have to show a lot, both in terms of level design and gameplay, to at least try to get closer to its reference models.

On the one hand we have the great cartoons of the first decades of the twentieth century, on the other hand the lessons of great video games that Fumi Games openly admits to drawing inspiration from, such as Bioshock, Doom, Cuphead, Boltgun, Metroid Prime, Ion Fury and even (a little gem!) Exhumed, a shooter from 1996. In short, there’s a lot going on in Mouse and the sincere hope is that it doesn’t burn out.