P.I. For Hire’s audacious worldbuilding

What’s the right amount of worldbuilding for a game like Fumi Games and Playside’s Mouse: P.I. For Hire?

If you ask the developers (and we did, more on that later), the answer is “a lot.” That much is obvious when you blaze through the studio’s debut first-person shooter, which puts you in the shoes of “Jack,” a mouse detective hired to look into the disappearance of a stage magician that, like all great mysteries, turns out to be part of an elaborate conspiracy involving cultists, cops, and “The Big Mouse Party” (BMP), a cartoonified version of the German American Bund. The player investigates this mystery not through deduction and logic puzzles, but by pouring bullets, turpentine, and cannonballs into hordes of cartoon enemies across a monochromatic coterie of locales.

This all takes place in a world portrayed in a “rubber hose” animation style that was popular in 1920s and 1930s animation (the very first image you see is of a steamboat named “Willie,” of course). It’s a fine example of what we’d call a “pastiche,” a work so referential of other games and media that it practically emulates them. And yet for a pastiche, Fumi Games has poured an unusual amount of original storytelling and worldbuilding into its debut game.

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Why is that surprising? Because when Fumi first teased the game in 2023, there wasn’t any sign this would be a game with extensive dialogue sequences, characters with overlapping backstories, and big narrative setpieces. The gameplay is inspired by the story-light shooters of the ’90s, and there’s a case for just making it the kind of game where players aggressively press forward.

But as Fumi Games CEO and co-founder Mateusz Michalak and lead narrative designer Mateusz Lechowski reminded us, this game does star a classic private detective. Detectives need mysteries to solve. And to craft a mystery worth solving, you need characters with hidden agendas, and a world that those agendas take place against. What follows is a fascinating tension where the game’s setting strives to be interesting, but not cross so far into real-world commentary.

Yet commentary—unintentional or not—cannot help but surface from the spicy stew of worldbuilding Fumi Games has cooked up. It’s a fantastic case study for developers who want to flesh out their game worlds—even if that risks writing uncomfortable metaphors that flatten or sand over real-world events.

What works about Mouse‘s worldbuilding?

Mouse: P.I. For Hire is at its best when the characters treat its cartoon pastiche world with absolute sincerity.

In Mouse: P.I. For Hire, the different threads of Jack’s investigation come to represent the different elements of this cartoon riff on the 1930s. The game’s central locale, a metropolis named Mouseburg, squishes a number of American settings together, from New York City to Los Angeles to the Louisiana Bayou, each with a different animated adversary fleshed out by repeated visits to these areas. Everyone in the world is a cartoon animal of some sort, with mice, shrews, and gators being some of the characters who meet (and sometimes try to murder) our gumshoe hero.

The anthropomorphizing of these animals creates the fascinating tonal tension in Mouse‘s story. This cartoon world is inspired by real-life history but not meant to be a direct metaphor or commentary on real events. However, the plot threads through subjects like the targeted abduction of shrews, police complicity in fascism, and the aforementioned BMP. 

There’s tension here because, for the most part, Fumi Games’ worldbuilding strategy works. There are three main mysteries at the heart of Jack’s investigation that lay the groundwork for the drama. In his quest for justice, Jack must answer three big questions.

Mouse‘s greatest storytelling advantage is that like all great detective stories, it knows the cast of characters—and all the potential suspects—matter far more than the answers to the big mysteries. Throughout the game, players encounter characters like politician Cornelius Stilton, gearhead surrogate daughter Tammy Tumbler, and journalist Wanda Fuller, who all take the game’s world and lore deeply seriously. They’re all a bit over-the-top, inspired by the performances of classic Film Noir movies (and maybe a bit of German Expressionist Cinema), but they all act as though alcoholic cheese, falling anvils, and crashing through walls and leaving behind silhouette-shaped holes are a part of everyday life.

Michalak explained that his animation background informed the decision to take a more earnest approach to the story rather than just leaning on parody. “In animation, the most important and crucial thing always is art, but the storyline, the narrative, the script, is also crucial,” he said. 

“There’s something about this kind of hard-boiled theme that we went for… that was already there in the concept and that was asking us to just take it a little bit further,” said Lechowski, noting that most other “boomer shooters” (first-person shooters with gameplay inspired by shooters from the 1990s) usually have very bare-bones narratives. “It was calling us to make a noir story that fits a boomer shooter. It was a separate challenge to make a story that resembles a detective experience, but doesn’t interfere With running and gunning.” 

He added that The Naked Gun film series also proved to be a surprising reference point here—not so much as a parody, but as a reference for how characters can treat situations with deadly seriousness while the audience takes in the jokes and gags.

That sincerity is really necessary for one worldbuilding thread inspired by both classic rubber-hose cartoons and, as Lewchowskiput it, the Fumi Games’ team adoration for otherworldly horror—the plotline involving a cult trying to enter the demon world.

From rubber-hose cartoons to True Detective, David Lynch, and Remedy Entertainment

Mouse‘s detective tale starts as a missing persons case but slowly ramps up into a horror-themed mystery that Lechowski says was inspired by Remedy Entertainment’s games, David Lynch’s films and TV shows, and the first season of the HBO show True Detective. That’s because Stage magician Steve Bandel hasn’t just vanished, he’s absconded to a pocket dimension called “The Unknown.”

The Unknown becomes an anchor point not just for the mystery, but the level design itself. One of Mouse‘s standout features is a spree of levels with unique setpieces inspired by each area’s identity. The movie studio levels are set on soundstages, a riverboat level weaves the player in and out of a VIP-only party, and a number of areas set in swampy or gothic locales slowly introduce the player to the madness of The Unknown.

This narrative justification opens the door for the level designers to experiment with more outlandish setpieces—leading to false doors and non-Euclidean geometry, eventually sending players to The Unknown itself. The whole affair might surprise players who came to Mouse with expectations of a purely noir-inspired tale, but Lechowski said it comes from his and the team’s love for “good cosmic horror.” 

Blending the cosmic horror genre (derived from the works of H.P. Lovecraft) isn’t “easily translatable” into rubber hose animation because cosmic horror is generally a somber, serious genre of storytelling. “Anything that even resembles satire is just undercutting the whole thing,” he explained. “We [asked], ‘why not take a swing at it and introduce some concepts that could possibly be built upon—that seed this idea in my player’s mind that there is something going on behind the curtains of this world, that there are some entities that are not what they necessarily seem, but sometimes they are.'”

Here, Lechowski was alluding to works of fiction that blend true crime and cosmic horror, playing with the notion that supernatural forces might be driving the dark events of the story, but its equally possible that plain human evil is at work. In Lynch’s beloved series Twin Peaks, the evil entity “Bob” does play a role in the murder of Laura Palmer—but in the film Fire Walk With Me, it’s established that Leland Palmer’s very human abuse of his own daughter, and how everyone in Twin Peaks allows it and other nefarious abuse to proceed unimpeded, is the far greater horror. 

Image via Fumi Games/PlaySide.

Mouse pays tribute to Lynch in a literal fashion too. Betty Lynch is named in honor of the beloved film director, and one specific cutscene was modeled after a shot from Mulholland Drive.

Likewise, in seasons one and four of the HBO show True Detective, the possibility of supernatural horrors like The Yellow King and a mysterious “spiral” creature buried in the Arctic ice is afoot. Again, these beings don’t become literally responsible for the murders at the heart of the mysteries, but the ambiguity of their existence is intertwined with the killers’ horrible acts.

“We also love [Remedy Entertainment’s] games, that was an inspiration too,” he said, adding that when this blending of true crime and horror is done properly, it “gives more than it takes” from the seriousness of conspiracy and murder.

But there’s another reason this setpiece works so well: it captures an element of Rubber Hose animation that’s not as recognizable as a gritty take on Steamboat Willie.  Animation houses like Fleischer Studios regularly flirted with the horror genre. In Swing You Sinners!, a cartoon dog is tormented by ghosts for his crimes, while Minnie The Moocher features a Rotoscoped Cab Calloway and a gang of skeletons haunting Betty Boop. And in Shiver Me Timbers, Popeye the Sailor and pals are terrorized by ghosts aboard a beached tall ship.

Mouse isn’t even the first game to pay tribute to those shorts—the final boss of Studio MDHR’s Cuphead is none other than the devil himself. Horror plays an important role in rubber hose animation history, and crafting setpieces inspired by these shorts shows there’s more to Mouse than meets the eye.

Unfortunately, while the characters’ commitment to fear of The Unknown helps make Mouse something special, its flirtations with real-world horror fall flat.

Sometimes Mouse flies too close to the sun

While playing Mouse, I regularly caught myself saying this phrase over and over again: “That’s a crazy choice for this game to make.”

Sometimes I was referencing the aforementioned horror sequences. But other times I was gobsmacked by when the game wanted to reach for real-world politics—and when it preferred to shy away.

The final villains of Mouse are ultimately those old reliable punching bags: the Nazis. Fumi Games deserves credit for not just placing German Nazis at the heart of the story, but by directly referencing the German American Bund and spotlighting how hatred and fascism don’t just grow overseas. In Mouse, the Big Mouse Party and a German-accented mad scientist from “The Old World” (the game’s nickname for Europe) are at the heart of a terror campaign targeting Mouseburg’s Shrew population. By the end of the game, it’s revealed that the Big Mouse Party recruited the Mouseburg police force to kidnap shrews and force them out of their homes. 

The shrews are characterized as a racial minority in Mouseburg who face bigotry from the city’s mice population. On paper, they don’t stand in for any real-world ethnic group. The BMP’s partnership with the Nazis summons evokes historic discrimination of Jews in the United States, but Lechowski added that a police raid on their hometown of “the Shrew Thicket” was inspired by the Tulsa race massacre of 1921, where a mob of white Tulsans tore through the city’s Black neighborhoods, destroying buildings and killing anywhere from 39 to 300 people.

Toss in the character of “Old Shrew,” a Voodoo priestess with a Bayou accent, and it becomes clear that this fictional marginalized group carries the burden of representing many American minorities that still face discrimination to this day. 

Lechowski affirmed that the shrews are not meant to stand in for any real-world ethnic group. “We tend to melt together center certain concepts. They represent a lot of oppressions that were happening in the time period all over the world,” he said.

Fumi’s intent here is clear, but in my time with the game, I found the choice wanting. It’s an example of Fantastic Racism, a storytelling trope where real-world bigotry is projected onto made-up groups or races in fantasy settings. As YouTuber Princess Weekes pointed out in a 2025 video essay on the topic, stories that derive bigotry based on narratively-justified differences between groups (here, the literal physical species difference between mice and shrews, and what appears to be a mystical connection between the Shrews and the Unknown) can risk validating racist beliefs.

And look, I’ll just say it. “Shrew” rhymes with “Jew,” and as a Jewish American, the rhyming just kept conjuring a very specific image with unfortunate connotations. With plenty of antisemitic propaganda comparing Jews to rodents out in the world, even loosely implying a reference to a real-world group raised the hairs on the back of my neck.

To be clear, I wasn’t offended by this depiction (though I can’t speak for anyone with ties to Voodoo culture, or even other Jewish folks playing the game). But it created an uneasy feeling of where I was supposed to take Mouse‘s real-world references as sharp and pointed and where they were supposed to just be for entertainment purposes. 

It’s surprising that Fumi chose such a middle-ground approach here when other bits of political commentary in the game seem so pointed. Making the cops antagonists is a strong fit for Mouse not just because of the ever-unfolding corruption exposed in policing, but also because early 20th-century fiction primarily depicted cops as bumbling or corrupt, leaving private detectives to root out crime and serve justice.

Image via Fumi Games/PlaySide.

Meanwhile a late-game gag about the editor-in-chief of a major newspaper is doing “cheese bumps” with members of the BMP got a laugh out of me, partly for feeling like a direct jab at media executives who play at political neutrality but then cozy up with far-right regimes. Beyond that, there are references to American war veterans suffering from PTSD, worker strikes, and abuses in mental asylums.

Lechowski and Michalak both mused on the fact that real-world political events, like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the looming tide of war on their own border (Fumi Games is based in Poland), may have influenced their work. Mouse‘s setting explicitly evokes the window between World Wars I and II, an era that may or may not reflect our modern day perhaps too closely (history has yet to determine that topic). 

Mouse takes these moments seriously (while delivering a gag-a-minute to the player), but if its depiction of real-world bigotry is too diluted to make a specific point, its characters can’t commit to the same kind of commentary that makes the rest of the game so fascinating.

I sympathize with Fumi on this topic, and I think they just missed the mark. The treatment of minorities is a potent theme when building a fictional setting, especially when your fictional world’s villains are cut from the same mold as the monsters of our own. Games like Wolfenstein: The New Order make it look easy, but it’s tough to build space for both genuine commentary on hatred and bombastic cartoon violence.

When you get it right, it makes punching those villains in the jaw feel that much better.

June’s inspiration recommendations – a world in black-and-white.

If there’s one thing I’ll stress about my time with Mouse: P.I. For Hire, it’s that I admire Fumi for taking such big swings even if all of them didn’t work out. I’d much rather play games or experience art that tries to be ambitious not just in craft, but in theme and storytelling. 

So let’s take a breather from discussing heady politics and celebrate a few selected black-and-white pieces that go beyond the shadows of detective fiction. Put these pictures on to stretch your boundaries and think more widely about what can be done with this beloved visual style.

That’s it for June. Stay cool out there, and I wish you luck in making worldbuilding choices as bold as Fumi Games’.