MOUSE: P.I. For Hire

I went in half-expecting style over substance, the kind of game where a jaw-dropping art direction papers over thin mechanics and then quietly overstays its welcome. What I found instead was a genuinely confident first-person shooter that earns the comparison people will inevitably make to early DOOM, and then does something those games never could: it wraps every firefight in hand-drawn, black-and-white rubber-hose animation so precise and full of personality that the combat itself feels like a cartoon stunt sequence. Jack Pepper, voiced with easy charm by Troy Baker, is a debt-ridden private investigator dragged through a noir conspiracy involving crooked cops, slippery politicians, and the kind of city-wide corruption that only makes sense when everyone has round ears and a tail. The story is functional rather than deep, though a handful of well-written side jobs fleshed out the characters enough that I actually cared by the time the corkboard in Jack's apartment started filling up with pinned clues. The combat is the main event, and it holds up. Movement is fast, the dash feels responsive, and the game gradually unlocks traversal tools like a double jump and a tail-spin glide that add genuine verticality to both platforming and shootouts. The arsenal spans about eleven weapons, from the Boomstick shotgun and the James Gun (an obvious nod to a certain filmmaker's Tommy Gun equivalent) to weirder picks like the Devarnisher, which melts enemies with acid-over-time, the Portable Freezer, which locks targets solid for follow-up punishment, and the late-game Hellrazor, a bone chainsaw the game hands you after literally dragging you through Hell. Each weapon except the D-Namite and Hellrazor supports three upgrade tiers through the B.A.N.G. (Schematics) system. Schematics are scattered across levels and tucked behind side jobs, and levels are not replayable, so there is a quiet pressure to explore carefully rather than just blasting through. Health does not regenerate; instead you manage cheese consumables and scavenge battlefield kits in proper boomer-shooter fashion, which keeps the pacing tense without ever feeling punishing on the default difficulty. Where the seams show is predictable: the arena-lock structure, where skull-marked doors slam shut and enemies pour in, happens often enough that by the midpoint you develop an involuntary sense of dread whenever you enter a large room. Enemy variety is reasonable within each faction but thin across the whole campaign, and some boss encounters lean more on gimmick than on skill. Early-launch bugs including invisible walls, ammo pickup friction, and occasional caption mismatches have been mostly addressed by post-launch patches, though the lip-sync in dialogue scenes remains charmingly erratic. The story writing splits opinion sharply: some players found the noir plotting genuinely engaging, while others checked out around the four-hour mark when the cheese puns accumulate faster than the plot revelations. That split feels honest. This is not a narrative game wearing an FPS costume; it is an FPS game that remembered to write decent jokes. What keeps MOUSE: P.I. For Hire in the memory long after the credits roll is the total commitment of the audiovisual package. The world is rendered in 3D while characters are hand-drawn in 2D and always snap to face you, a technical trick that sounds odd and looks extraordinary in motion. Locations range from opera houses and harbours to swamps and haunted villages, each one dense with environmental jokes and hidden collectibles like baseball cards, newspapers, and comic strips. The big-band jazz soundtrack is tuned so precisely to the action that quieter investigative stretches feel like a different instrument coming in on the same song. For a debut game from a small Polish studio, the level of craft here is striking. At roughly ten to twelve hours for the main campaign, it knows when to end, which is the thing I respect most in any game this ambitious.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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