Last week, the Xbox Partner Showcase revealed a new trailer for a game that’s lit up players’ imagination thanks to its subversive take on a classic cartoon. Mouse: P.I. For Hire, the upcoming first-person shooter due in 2025 from Polish studio Fumi Games, looks like Steamboat Willie had been handed a few guns to cut loose and make Walt Disney roll over in his grave.
But when I caught up with the developers in Cologne, Germany, at Gamescom back in August, they told me they didn’t set out to be iconoclasts mocking Mickey Mouse. Instead, they’re avid fans of the Betty Boop era of classic cartoons. Though this early period of cartoons has a cozy patina of silliness, the content was frequently violent and morbid, making for a fun juxtaposition that fits shooters.
Fumi Games started as an animation studio, its lead producer Maciej Krzemień told me, and its artists explored many art styles over the years. The one they settled on for the game that would eventually become Mouse: P.I. For Hire — the so-called “rubber hose” style embodied by Fleischer Studios cartoons of the 1930s and 40s — wasn’t even popular in Europe at the time. It caught on way later, in the 1980s and 90s, Krzemień said. And it remains appealing. Rubber hose, named for the loopiness of characters’ body parts and movements, was the first big American animation style in cartoons, embodied in characters like Betty Boop and Popeye.
“I think the rubber hose style is universal enough that everyone can find some sense of joy in watching those cartoons and recreating them,” Krzemień said.
Fumi Games’ developers wanted to make a shooter with a cartoon look, and it was Fumi Games’ art director who was such a fan of the rubber hose animation style. He discovered a piece of fan art for the game BioShock, created by Liz is the Biz and posted on Tumblr and was inspired to create his own vision of a rubber hose shooter. He posted the result to X, formerly known as Twitter, back in 2022. That took off, and the team had to scramble to capitalize, Fumi Games CEO and game director Mateusz Michalak recalled.
“Back then, we didn’t have even a Steam Page,” Michalak said, adding that he quickly made one over the weekend after the screenshot went viral.
Cartoony looks, Doom-influenced gunplay
While chatting at Gamescom, the developers demonstrated how far the game had come since that early prototype. Despite retaining its fun, cartoony look, the game’s gunplay looks tightly designed with new abilities for traversal. One example includes a grappling hook ability that uses the player character’s tail, which fleshes out the game’s “metroidvania” exploration elements.
Fumi Games’ developers recalled an online comment on earlier footage calling Mouse: P.I. For Hire “if Cuphead and Doom had a baby.” Appropriately, the studio brought on developers of the recent Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal first-person shooters to consult for the game.
The game’s noir-esque story has been fleshed out, too. Players slip on the white gloves of Jack Pepper, a World War I veteran turned private eye who runs and guns his way through the grimy streets of Mouseburg. True, there’s a stylistic resemblance to Disney’s black-and-white Steamboat Willie. But Mouse: P.I. For Hire leans into other rubber hose hallmarks like smiling flowers and an amusing smiling bullet icon in the ammo counter. Jack Pepper and the other rodents you encounter have a pronounced snout that looks more like Rat Fink than Mickey Mouse’s progenitor.
It’s the animations that sell Mouse’s fantasy. While the pistol, shotgun, tommy gun and lewis machine gun are deadly accurate with their precise gunplay, they bounce around with cartoonish vigor. The reload animations look delightfully loose, highlighting the game’s enjoyable contrast between cartoon silliness and lethal shooter gameplay.
“Our animations are created from the ground up using very old-school techniques,” said Michalak.
But the developers noted how challenging it can be to hand-animate elements so consequential to gameplay as how the guns work. The team might have to speed up or slow down reload speeds or fire rates, for example, to properly balance a gun. It’s difficult to cut a feature if it’s already animated, so the team has to be careful about what makes it that far, and what they can salvage from cut materials. Once finished, the animations are all put together in the graphics program Blender and then implemented in Unity, the popular engine used in Mouse: P.I. For Hire and many other games.
To situate the game’s sound in its 1930s noir period, Fumi Games took two different approaches. Not only did the studio have a “big band” jazz orchestra compose and record new tracks specifically for the project, but it also licensed music from the 1930s to ground players in the sound of that decade. At a fan’s request, the studio implemented another neat trick to evoke the period — crackling audio. This effect can be toggled on and off from the settings menu to simulate the experience of listening to aging wax cylinders or vinyl recordings.
Cartoons and violent video games aren’t too far from each other, Krzemień noted, since old cartoons can feature dark and mature themes. It’s not difficult to find an old “rubber hose” cartoon that features death, poisoning, alcoholism and worse. Sometimes they’re intended as moralistic fables, but they’re often just for thrills. Heck, one of the most famous Fleischer cartoons sees Betty Boop going to Hell.
But Krzemień sees cartoons as being much more than just an entertainment medium. As Mouse: P.I. For Hire proves, he views them as being a source of inspiration, too.
“I believe [cartoons are] a great Bible for people that they can use and create something new,” Krzemień said.
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Read More: Doom Meets Cuphead in a Noir-Style Cartoon Shooter Due Next Year
