10 Hours In, Mouse P.I.'s Style Can't Save It

Few games this year have made a stronger first impression than Mouse: P.I. For Hire. The 1930s rubber hose animation is hand-drawn frame by frame, the big band jazz soundtrack slaps, and the noir detective setup with grizzled PI Jack Pepper is exactly the kind of weird creative swing I love seeing from indie studios. But according to early impressions, including a detailed write-up from GamesRadar, the game's style is doing almost all the heavy lifting while its gameplay buckles under the weight of its own length.

The core problem isn't that Mouse: P.I. For Hire is bad. It's that it peaks early and then asks you to keep going for hours without giving you enough new reasons to do so. Enemies repeat across wildly different environments, puzzles rarely evolve beyond hitting a switch or blowing up a wall, and the combat lacks the speed that makes classic boomer shooters feel electric. Enemies soak bullets on standard difficulty without posing real danger, which is a combination that turns firefights into chores rather than tests of skill. I covered this game's launch earlier this week and was excited about it, so seeing these reports is a letdown.

What really twists the knife is how the game constantly reminds you of everything you haven't done yet. A half-empty weapon wheel taunts you every time you swap guns. The overworld map of Mouseburg displays locked locations alongside completed ones. A crime board with a gaping hole in the middle screams "you're not even close to finished." In a tight six-hour shooter, that kind of drip-feed works. Stretched across what appears to be a significantly longer campaign, it becomes exhausting. The weapon upgrade system doesn't help either; tiers mostly offer incremental stat bumps like bigger clips and reduced recoil rather than anything that changes how a gun actually feels.

At £24.99 across Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC, the price point is fair, and the game runs well on current hardware, with the Xbox Series X hitting 4K/60 in quality mode and up to 120fps in performance mode. I just wish the gameplay had the same ambition as the art direction. Mouse: P.I. For Hire is a gorgeous shell around a shooter that needed either half the runtime or twice the ideas.