Recreating the graphic style of Mouse: P.I.

Mouse P.I. For Hire is a game that I have had on my radar for awhile. Its unconventional incorporation of beautifully animated 2D rubber hose animation within a Bioshock shooter makes this game stand out from the crowd.

In anticipation of this game I decided to make a small prototype to start to emulate its visual style.

I started by creating some assets. This was difficult because I think a big part of what really sells the illusion of Mouse P.I. is how smooth the animations are. I will not be doing this. I tried to find a decent compromise of readability and simplicity.

I created a basic environment and tried to recreate how the sprites in the Mouse P.I. trailer. I initially thought that all of the graphics would be billboard sprites. I realized that this wouldn’t be enough. All of the static sprites in the trailer seem to keep their unique rotations where hostile NPCs seem to face the player as they approach. I thought that this might not look as good, or would slightly affect how the flat animation feels due to the camera distortion of the the 3D sprites, but after doing some tests I found that it was far more negligible than I thought. If I really wanted to push the effect further I might make a shader that can billboard the graphics at specific angles, but that is a project for another day. I instead used the bullets as an opportunity to keep this billboard effect and think it looks very close to the original.

I did take a shortcut by using tweening on the hand gui element and I think that this is important. A big part of what sells the illusion of the original game is its ludicrous amount of juice. Now that I have gone through all of this effort, I see that more/better assets are needed to polish this demo further. Graphics like these take an insane amount of time to create and I think that is one of the reasons Mouse P.I. looks so good. If an effect like this was easy to produce we would have seen someone attempt it sooner.

You can download the entire project here:

https://mattf.blog/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/mouse-p.i.-fps-example.zip

All and all, I think that this demo was a success, and if I were to iterate upon it, I would push the assets further.