Mouse: P.I.

For HireMouse: P.I.

for Hire ReviewFor God’s sake, man, what about the gumshoes?By Will BorgerUpdated: Apr 14, 2026 5:16pm UTC183 commentsI love noir.

I’ll take all kinds: the hardboiled detective, the seedy crime story, neo noir, classic pulp – you name it, I’m buying.

.

So when Mouse: P.I.

for Hire sauntered onto my screen the way Ilsa walks into Rick’s in Casablanca, I was pretty excited about it.

But noir isn’t just an aesthetic to be thrown on like an old coat as you’re leaving your office at the behest of a leggy blonde.

While Mouse: P.I.

.

for Hire clearly understands the style and tropes of classic noir films and novels, as well as 1930s cartoons more broadly, it doesn’t seem to get why those things are there, or how they are used to tell compelling stories.

By fusing a hardboiled detective mystery with a fast, retro-style FPS, developer Fumi Games has made a shooter that is thematically incoherent, with the apparent aspirations of its story contradicted at every point by the actual action.

Of all the Steam Libraries in all the PCs in all the world, Mouse: P.I.

for Hire walked into mine.

.

And I wish I liked it more than I do.Mouse follows Jack Pepper, a private eye in a world where everyone is a mouse, after Wanda Fuller from the Mouseburg Herald sets him on the case of a missing magician.

As you’d expect, that spirals into a much larger conspiracy that includes an attempt on a mayoral candidate’s life and racially motivated mouse-on-mouse violence as bigger mice oppress the smaller shrews.

Same as it ever was, even in Mouseburg, and the requisite twists and turns you’d expect from any good detective story make this tale solid enough.

Mouse: P.I.

.

For Hire Steam ScreenshotsView 8 ImagesWhat bothers me, however, is how overly-referential so much of it is.

This is a world of mice, so everything is about cheese.

Everything.

A bad guy? He’s a cheeselegger ## Editor's Note The implications of this news could be significant for the industry. Source: [IGN](https://www.ign.com/articles/mouse-pi-for-hire-review)