The 1930s return as a first-person shooter in Mouse: P.I. For Hire
The new game pays tribute to the animation, music, and crime fiction of the era, without ignoring its politics.
Images: Fumi Games
Less than an hour in Mouseberg makes it clear this is a city where people shoot first and ask questions never—and that Mouse: P.I. For Hire is a game with a lot on its plate. It’s a fast-paced first-person shooter where movement is key. It’s a platformer at times, and a little clunky about it. It’s a loving homage to the 1930s, from its animation to its jazz to its hardboiled crime fiction. Most importantly, it’s a game with such explicit parallels to the pre-World War II rise of the 20th century’s most notorious losers that you’d have to be ignorant or in denial to miss it.
Developed by Polish studio Fumi Games, Mouse: P.I. For Hire immediately establishes its Depression-era fixation through “rubber hose” animation, a swing score, urban landscapes dotted with Vaudeville posters, and newspaper stories about strikes and mass immigration. It wastes no time moving from the cultural to the political, introducing its version of Nazis in an early mission. The degree to which the game’s Big Mouse Party mirrors infamous historical fascists—from its rhetoric, to its iconography, to its hostility to the law—is immediate and unmistakable, even before it digs into the oppression that the shrews (get it yet?) face compared to their mouse counterparts. Players will spend much time learning about all this as they solve several big cases that land at private eye Jack Pepper’s doorstep. Getting to know Mouseberg is to watch a city on the precipice of a familiar nightmare from our past, as subtext simply becomes text.
It’s far from a proper history lesson, if all the anthropomorphic mice didn’t tip you off. Mouse offers a unique story with often predictable but amusing twists that eventually diverges from its historical inspiration, but the takeaways will be similar. Still, Mouse approaches the subject matter in a commendable way. In 2026, it’s very easy to point at fascism and all but point a finger while screaming “Bad!” all day. Fumi Games does a bit more by showing how a deep hate for people based on identity isn’t the only way stupid and cruel systems are born. Moments throughout Pepper’s adventures show how opportunism and profit-seeking perpetuate those same systems too, making their apathetic devotees just as responsible for evil as those who fervently believe in race science. Mouse doesn’t use the ’30s solely as aesthetic reference points, but gives ample space to the political currents of the era—which is good to see, especially given how those ills have flared up so much this century.
As a game, Mouse is a familiar but entertaining ride. Each level is a pattern of climbs and descents where the slow pace of looking for clues, lockpicking safes with Pepper’s tail, and talking to micefolk is interrupted by enemies who come crashing in (often literally) with guns blazing inside makeshift arenas. The dashing and jumping required to survive these sections will ring a bell for anyone who’s dabbled in the ’90s-indebted “boomer shooter” space, and Jack Pepper has a sizable arsenal at his disposal to fend off the waves of mobsters, corrupt cops, and cultists that ambush him. While the enemy diversity is relatively slim and the loop quickly grows repetitive—especially the safe cracking—a few progressively unlocked mechanical twists and a modest playtime of about 12 hours prevents Mouse from turning into a bore. And, should you ever need a break from all the lead unloading, there’s a neat card-based baseball minigame where pitchers and batters face off based on assigned values and booster cards.
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