Developed/Published by: Fumi Games / Playside Studio
Released: 16/04/2026
Completed: 08/09/2026
Completion: Finished it.

Quake was in the news recently, what with it being the 30th Anniversary and that, and seeing all that hot Quake action got me in the mood to play a shooter of the boomer persuasion. I considered revisiting Quake, but to be honest, I was never that hot on it. I’ve always preferred my shooters to have more of a sense of place (I was more of a Duke Nukem 3D guy when it came to level design.) So nosing around I remembered Mouse: P.I. For Hire had come out this year, and thought I’d give it a shot, considering the obvious effort put into the world.

Really wish I’d played Quake, to be honest. I’m beginning to realise that my intention with this site–to generally try and write about indies when I’m not writing about retro–isn’t doing me any favours. That’s three new games in a row now that I found initially interesting but which ground me down into despair. I said it with Denshattack, but developers, please, dear god, less is more. I was surprised to discover that I’d played this for “only” just over thirteen hours, because it felt endless. Really much like Denshattack, Mouse: P.I. For Hire would have been an entertaining trifle at half (or hopefully less) the time. I don’t give scores, but if I did, I could feel the score tick down as the hours went by. “Well, you know, it’s a solid six, almost a seven but it didn’t quite have the spark…. Ach, it’s a five, there really isn’t that much to it… four, I’m not sure what I saw in it to begin with…”

I think much like Denshattack, what makes writing these articles seems sort of bitter and counterproductive, considering I’d really like the games industry to survive (to the point where it could rehire me???) is that I can see that this was a game with a lot of love and effort lavished on it. But it’s also, simply, unsuccessful at what it’s trying to do.

First up: it’s a take on a noir. Good! It’s a fun genre, there are lots of tropes to pull from, and you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. But I’m going to explain something and I think it’s going to make really clear how wrong Mouse P.I. get it.

In my playthrough, it took four and a half hours for the femme fatale to show up.

After playing this, I saw that Game Developer’s Bryant Francis had written up a pretty nice analysis of the game’s narrative, and it reflects a studio that was just trying to cram everything in that they loved, every idea that they had, but as a result they ended up with, well, a mess. I suppose it’s (sort of) funny that at the end of the game the clue board you’ve been building is a Pepe Silvia that you can’t parse, but there absolutely came a point where I stopped following the narrative because much like Denshattack (again) it felt like all plot and no character (once the femme fatale shows up she just… stands around in your office, for example.) I appreciate, as Francis does, that the game is trying to make big swings; but I was already bored by the time I was killing demons in hell with a cartoon chainsaw and absolutely thinking “why am I doing any of this?”

(Francis is far more charitable than me in general, but I particularly agree with him highlighting the messy use of “fantastic racism” via the treatment of shrews as second-class citizens to mice. It’s something that I really cringed at—it is rough when the voodoo priestess shows up—and which I suspect speaks to the limits of experience of the team.)

The weighting of the team’s priorities just seems wildly out of wack. There’s so much narrative, and the game generally looks great, but the core shooting play feels almost vestigial despite being the main way you interact with the world. There are what feels like four enemy types (normal guys that shoot at you, wee guys that run at you, big bullet sponges that run at you, and wee guys that fly and shoot at you) with minor variations, and every encounter is just “run around in a small arena trying not to get trapped or hitscanned to death using whatever your strongest weapon is.”

The game hands out weapons on a glacially slow pace and the weapons it does hand out don’t offer much in the way of variety. Once you’ve unlocked the “devarnisher” (sort of a grenade launcher) and the James gun (a machine gun, and I see what they did there) there’s really no reason to switch unless you’re out of ammo, because most everything else is underwhelming (the shotguns, in particular, feel slow and totally underpowered, even when upgraded.)

It’s like they’ve missed what the point of a variety of enemies and weapons are: the combinations are supposed to create interesting encounters! There’s no sense here that enemies synergise either with other enemies or the level designs, and if there is a reason to set enemies on fire or whatever outside of just trying to do raw damage I don’t see it. Once you’ve played the first couple of levels, there’s really no more to it, outside of (frankly) annoying, bullet-sponge bosses with phases that just seem to drag on and on.

There’s a lot of “well, this is a thing games have in it” here, really. A perfect example is that throughout the game the hero unlocks new traversal abilities. All the usual Metroidvaniaey things: double jump, wall run, that sort of thing. Remember how everyone loved the wallrun in Titanfall 2? Well, here it shows up late in the game, and you can use it on specifically marked wallrun panels, which are rare. 

Indeed, none of these abilities are there to–for example–open up new areas in levels you’ve previously been to (the classic reason you do this) and nor do they really show up much after they’ve been introduced (in fact, you’ll definitely forget some of them, like being able to float.) The levels are pretty and they’ve got a great sense of place, but it’s naive game design: you’ve put the things in you think games need, without interrogating if your game needs it, and then once it’s there, you don’t even really do anything with it!

Mouse P.I. is a facade, and I mean that in the architectural sense: if you look at it straight on, it looks amazing, but if you even slightly investigate it, you can see there’s nothing behind it and it’s just being held up with some wonky support beams. I don’t doubt that this team could create something incredible, but I think they’d need to drill further down on what they actually like when playing games and make that. It’s so easy to get tied up in the thing you’re making than the thing you would actually want to make. A little more focus, a little stronger authorial, design-minded vision, a little harder on the edit… they’ve probably got something.

Will I ever play it again? They’re doing DLC, and hopefully they’ll have had some time to think about what worked and what didn’t with Mouse P.I., but I’m good.

Final Thought: I suppose if I was looking for some modern-but-not-modern Quakey fun maybe I should have waited for Sprawl Zero. Looking at that, however, will have to wait, because I excitedly downloaded Torneko’s Mystery Dungeon HD as soon as it came out like a huge idiot and have spent far too long playing that.