The upcoming action-packed, first-person shooter, Mouse P.I. for Hire just had some new gameplay videos released, and it’s made us even more keen to get our hands on it! Originally released via IGN, the Mouse P.I. gameplay videos each feature exclusive new gameplay not yet seen ahead of the game’s launch on March 19.
For anyone new here, Mouse P.I. for Hire is being developed by Fumi Games and published by Playside. It follows private investigator Detective Jack Pepper (voiced by Troy Baker) on a “guns-blazing, jazz-fueled” adventure. With animation akin to 1930s Steamboat Willie, the game delivers a classic cartoon aesthetic and brings retro vibes to a whole new level.
Players will fight to uncover the truth as a simple missing-persons mystery escalates, driving them through the corrupted underbelly of Mouseburg. As we all know, these criminals won’t go down without a fight.
Spoilers ahead…
The first video is over 12 minutes long and is noted in the description, “from Vaudeville, the second mission of the campaign and the first case Jack gets assigned”. The video starts by opening with Detective Jack Pepper fighting some enemies with his fists and gun, before transitioning to a conversation with a character named Wanda.
The jazz music in the background sets the scene as she gives Pepper information of an investigation surrounding a magician by the name of The Magnificent Bandel, and it seems there’s been a kidnapping at one of his shows. Pepper already seems familiar with the guy, so Wanda allows him to use her own pass to get backstage and investigate. After showing an “intellectually innocent” guard the pass, Pepper is granted access to Bandel’s greenroom. At this point of the video, it does already feel like you’re a detective piecing together the puzzle. Walking around a crime scene, receiving vital details from informants, and gaining access to prohibited areas – really sets the tone of the game so far.
Upon further investigation, the Detective comes across a policeman down a hall of locked rooms, bordering a doorway with police tape. The guard is distracted and mistakes him for someone else, so Pepper continues his search and finds a small crawlspace in a room nearby, which leads to a backstage area that includes levers and a ladder leading to a tank filled with water and a small key, submerged at the bottom.
Once Pepper uses the levers to activate the ladder to the tank (and the other to open the curtains to the stage), the small key can be obtained by swimming to the bottom of the tank. The detective then returns to the hallway with the police tape to unlock Bandel’s greenroom. Upon entering, he immediately has to check for clues and gets to snapping photos of Steve Bandel’s poster and address book hidden in a drawer. Pepper also has some voice lines associated with a photo of the two of them together, hanging on the wall, before exiting the room and continuing the investigation under the police tape in the hallway, now that the guard is nowhere to be seen.
In the newly unlocked area, Jack Pepper is confronted with a couple of lackeys, who come from behind a wall and want to fight. While the fighting mechanics are fun and this is the first time we see the enemies (at least in this video) and get to use our gun, these bad guys feel a bit misplaced in this instance. They were probably used as a simple obstacle for the detective to face off, giving players a chance to use their weapons, before finishing the area, rather than the narrative leading him away immediately. After very quickly defeating them, the Detective continues investigating and eventually finds an exit. Outside the building, Pepper is faced with more bad guys, but the only goal now is to reach the Magician Assistant’s apartment to find more information.
He enters a nearby building, goes upstairs, doesn’t find anything incriminating at first, but spots a breakable window leading to the fire escape. Smashing it with his fists, he climbs out and into the room next door where he finds some skeletal bodies, picking up collectible baseball cards along the way. He breaks some crates with “?” written on them and exits the flat, following a tattered hallway upstairs and across to a locked door. Now intending to open the lock, he turns around, breaks a piece of furniture and enters the room across from him.
Pepper comes across a wall branded “Totally Normal Wall” and comments “Damn Shinglers and their explosive barrels” implying that you can’t get through there, at least for now. The dialogue feels very on brand for Jack Pepper, with quips like these fitting into the old-timey stereotype of a quick-witted but snarky detective. It gives more context for what his character is like, while giving the players instructions to follow at the same time. He turns and instead breaks down a bathroom door nearby to find the key inside before grabbing it and returning to the locked door. He unlocks it, walks inside and takes a blueprint “Clue” off the table before returning to the wall with explosives, shooting a barrel inside the gap, causing the wall to explode and a new area to be revealed.
After more exploration, he comes across a room with more lackeys, takes one of them out with an anvil hanging from the ceiling (a typical 30s cartoon takedown), and the rest with his gun before continuing back outside, after taking a swig from a health bottle he found on the way out.
He begins to fight more bad guys in the street, even throwing an explosive barrel at one before heading down to the crowded subway and weaving his way through passersby who make comments at him as he goes. Elements such as the anvil and explosive barrels keep the combat feeling fun, especially because I was worried about the shooting feeling a little repetitive. Having enemies appear in most rooms also keeps things interesting, as players never know where they will come from, just how many will keep coming and it holds them back from progressing too easily in the puzzle-solving.
As a train pulls up to the platform, he continues through some back passages, near the far wall, full of steam vents, and comes into a slightly bigger area with a closed-off gate and more lackeys who want to throw hands. They come into the room one after the other, and when there’s no more left to defeat, Pepper’s eyes catch sight of a wire making its way across the wall above the gate, and into a control room on the top floor. He makes his way up and turns on the switch to open the gate before taking on the new bad guys who make their way through.
The detective continues down the corridors leading to another platform, throwing explosive barrels at enemies as he needs to, before discovering an area next to the train that had just arrived. He sees it connects to another entrance where he finds Janitor Mike Maple who warns Pepper about some bad guys heading upstairs and allows the Detective to take the blueprints on the table behind him. Pepper heads on up, defeats the leftover enemies and finally exits the subway into the Magician Assistant’s neighbourhood, and that’s where our video ends.
This 12-minute video is quite enticing and gives a real feel of the mystery and pace the game holds. The rubber-hose cartoons are striking alongside the music and accents of the characters; players are really thrown back to the old cartoons of that time.
The second gameplay clip featured a sneak peek of Mouse: P.I.’s boss fights! The lack of jazz music in this one makes it a bit more eerie, too. While taking on the “White Lies and Dark Secrets” quest, Jack Pepper finds himself face-to-face with an angry ghost bride named “The Third Wife”. Amongst some confusion about Pepper’s identity, she starts attacking him, believing he is her scheming husband.
A fight ensues, and players have to defeat The Third Wife, all while avoiding her flaming skull projectiles and taking down the ghost lackeys that attempt to protect her. Pepper soon realises that while bullets work on the other ghosts, they don’t seem to hurt the big bad, and suggests she hates light. Players must then use their flashlight to burn her multiple apparitions around the map, taking down her health bar piece by piece. She will occasionally throw up a shield to defend herself, but it looks like that can be taken down by Pepper’s guns or a blast cannon-type weapon you can alternate to. I was also relieved, at this point, to see Pepper using a different type of gun and actually switching between two or three of them all up. The different strengths and ammunition of each gun could end up correlating to the different strengths of enemies or in this case, the shields used to protect the enemies.
After quite a few shots, the battle climaxes with multiple projectiles coming from The Third Wife in the middle of the map, while she wields her strongest shield, so players must maneuver amongst them, take down the shield and get one last hit. Personally, I was ecstatic to find out there were boss fights in the game. While detective games are more puzzle-solving and narrative-based, a big bad boss fight fits in well with the classic cartoon theme.
The fight is soon finished, and The Third Wife’s anger has quelled while she realises Jack Pepper isn’t who she originally thought. A small dialogue moment between the characters happens before she disappears, and Pepper leaves through a black and white portal.
It is to be assumed that this is one of the easier bosses the game has to offer, but the boss fight really does show the dynamic between the main character and how he interacts with the world around, especially while being in a heated, high-tension battle with the Third Wife. Players must really know the controls at this point to tactfully switch between weapons and quickly out-maneuver the projectiles and smaller enemies in this fight. While the Third Wife doesn’t seem like the main enemy to the overarching story, I’m excited to see what other boss characters have to offer, and whether there is a main antagonist actually overseeing crime within Mouseburg.
After seeing the released gameplay videos, I am excited for more to come! Mouse P.I. for Hire has been on my own wishlist since it was first announced, as I was intrigued by the nostalgic cartoon design and am also a fan of FPS games with a narrative. While I am a big, big fan of boss fights (think Zelda, Dark Souls & Resident Evil), I also do love a good detective story, so I am keen to see more of the mystery-solving and whether the puzzles increase in difficulty as the game goes on. I’m also interested to learn more of the backstory of Detective Jack Pepper, just how he became a P.I. and got into this mess to begin with, and why he seems to have so many connections to the Mouseburg criminal underbelly himself.
Mouse P.I. for Hire is set to release on 19th March 2026 and will be available on PlayStation consoles, Xbox consoles, Nintendo Switch consoles, and Steam. IGN has also stated that more gameplay videos will be uploaded to YouTube in the lead-up to the game’s release.
