Imagine a room in Warsaw. It is 2019. A small team of animators, four people deep, is hunched over tablets drawing the same mouse from eight different angles. Front. Front-left. Side. Back. Each angle gets its own set of hand-drawn frames. Each frame gets inked, cleaned, and dropped into a 3D engine that will billboard the sprite toward the camera no matter where the player looks. This is not the efficient way to build a first-person shooter. This is the Fumi Games way.

Animators First, Game Developers Second

Fumi Studio, the parent entity, is a Polish production company founded in 2009 by Piotr Furmankiewicz and Mateusz Michalak with a passion for film animation and a desire to support young animation students. Over the past ten-plus years, the studio produced over 50 animated films that brought over 150 prizes from national and international festivals, including 18 grand prix. That is the pedigree. When Michalak spun off Fumi Games as a game development arm, he wasn’t a programmer pivoting to art. He was an animator pivoting to interactivity. The difference matters.

Michalak told 80 Level that the early days were “quite funny.” The studio’s main inspiration was Cuphead, because “for the first time, we noticed that a game with significant artistic value stood out and was a success in the gaming market.” From the start, they wanted to make a first-person shooter, thinking it would be easy. “But it wasn’t; it turned out to be actually really hard to make a great FPS game, but back then, we thought that it was a walk in the park.” The first prototype was built in the Godot engine and “didn’t have much to do with rubber hose animation.”

That prototype is gone now. What replaced it, after years of painstaking development, is MOUSE: P.I. For Hire, which launches today, April 16, 2026. The game is a first-person shooter with designs linked to Steamboat Willie and rubber hose animation, developed by Fumi Games and published by PlaySide Studios. It arrives on Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5, Windows, and Xbox Series X/S. It costs $29.99. And every character, every weapon, every dancing slug in the background was drawn by a human hand.

The Pipeline Nobody Would Recommend

The technical achievement here is genuinely unusual. As Xbox Wire detailed, while environments are rendered in 3D, every single character, enemy, UI element and weapon has been painstakingly hand-drawn in 2D and animated to resemble the classic 1930s “rubber hose” animation. PC Gamer’s review called the blend of “3D Unity environments and 2D hand-drawn weapon and character sprites” unique.

The trick sounds simple on paper, and it dates back to the billboard sprites of the Nintendo 64 era. But Fumi’s version is something else entirely. As Michalak has explained in interviews, in order to show enemies walking through the world, the team has to draw and animate the same enemy many times and from different perspectives (front, front left, front right, side, back, and so on). Multiply that across dozens of enemy types, weapon animations, death sequences, and environmental objects. Now do it all in black and white, where you cannot lean on color to separate foreground from background or guide the player’s eye.

I’d argue this is the kind of creative constraint that separates a gimmick from a philosophy. Fumi didn’t just pick a look. They picked a set of limitations and then built every system around solving them. PC Gamer noted that “what’s more impressive than the visual effect itself is how readable the game remains,” praising the fact that players can “discern multiple enemy types, environmental hazards, ammo/health pickups and collectibles at a glance” despite the monochrome palette.

The Hand-Crafted Declaration

In March 2026, when Gamereactor asked Michalak directly about AI usage in the game’s development, his answer was blunt. Michalak stated: “Mouse: P.I. For Hire is an entirely hand-crafted game, delivering a unique experience that we hope players will enjoy!”

No hedging. No “we used AI for some internal prototyping.” Just a clean declaration. In my view, that sentence functions as a manifesto even if the studio never published a formal one. It draws a line. On one side: the labor, the hours, the hand cramps. On the other: everything the industry is currently racing toward.

Fumi even extended the commitment to audio, adding customizable audio filters so players can tailor the soundtrack’s vintage character to their taste. That is not a feature you build because a focus group asked for it. That is a feature you build because you are obsessed.

The Polish Perspective

One thread worth pulling: Fumi Games is not an American studio channeling American nostalgia. They are Polish. And when the game first went viral on TikTok in 2023, Michalak told 80 Level that “coming from Poland, Fumi’s developers were raised on a different style of cartoons,” and that “it was quite surprising for us to receive comments alleging that we copied Disney with our art style. To that, I can say that rubber hose is not Disney’s property but rather a general animation style.”

He’s right. Rubber hose predates Disney. It belongs to the Fleischer brothers as much as anyone. It belongs to Ub Iwerks. It belongs to every anonymous inker at a New York animation desk in 1928. And as of January 1, 2024, the Steamboat Willie version of Mickey Mouse itself entered the public domain. Fumi Games didn’t swipe Disney’s homework. They arrived at the same visual language from a completely different direction, and the timing of Steamboat Willie’s copyright expiration only widened the runway.

What the Critics Found

The reviews are in, and they paint a picture of a game whose art outpaces its mechanics but whose mechanics still hold up. At the time of writing, the game sits at a Metacritic rating of 81 and an OpenCritic score of 83, which is remarkable for a debut title from a studio this size.

PC Gamer’s reviewer opened with a telling admission: “I’m surprised to tell you that Mouse: PI For Hire is the best shooter I’ve played in ages.” Not every critic was so effusive. One review described the game as “a mechanically solid albeit mostly average FPS wrapped in a beautifully realised stylistic package with incredible commitment to the bit.” In the gaming community, the debate is lively. Animation enthusiasts tend to compare MOUSE favorably to Cuphead. As one reviewer put it, “comparisons to Cuphead are inevitable, but this is on a different level of scope.”

My take: the tension between art and mechanics is actually the most interesting thing about the game’s reception. MOUSE doesn’t need to be the tightest shooter ever made. It needs to be tight enough that the art isn’t carrying dead weight. And by most accounts, it clears that bar.

Ink, Sweat, Stubborn Dreams

Michalak told Gamereactor that “the very first video that we posted about the game onto TikTok blew up out of nowhere, and it was a snowball effect from that moment onwards. Our game has generated over 1.3 million wishlists.” From four people in a Warsaw office to a multi-platform launch with Troy Baker voicing the lead and a Funko Pop collaboration. That trajectory is wild.

But I keep coming back to the frames. Thousands upon thousands of hand-drawn frames, each one a small act of defiance against the idea that efficiency is the only metric that matters. Fumi Games didn’t draw every frame because it was smart. They drew every frame because they are animators, and animators draw. The game exists because someone in Warsaw looked at the most labor-intensive possible approach to building an FPS and said: yes, that one.

MOUSE: P.I. For Hire is available now on PC, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch 2 for $29.99. Physical editions on PS5 disc and Switch 2 cartridge arrive July 10.