As a big fan of Luck be a Landlord, the quirky slot-machine-based roguelike deckbuilder where you try to pay rent on time or die trying, I was thrilled at the announcement of Maze Mice, Trampoline Tales’ new game, releasing this year… or rather… now. I genuinely loved the demo that much.
No matter how much time you’ve spent in their prior game, you’ll know how great the dev’s ability to blend humour, absurdity and a surprising amount of strategy into this wacky mishmash of a pretty compelling experience is.
Maze Mice, their new release, isn’t just following in those steps but actually sets a new precedent. It’s funny and very bizarre, but also makes a lot of sense, and it’s surprising that it hasn’t been done before. It’s pretty darn great, and today I wanna share my thoughts on why that is.
Developer: TrampolineTales
Publisher: TrampolineTales
Genre: Indie, Roguelike, Bullet Heaven, PacMan-like?
Release Date: May 2nd, 2025
Reviewed on: PC
Available on: PC
Copy was provided by PR.
Maze Mice could probably be best described as the lovechild of Pac-Man and any Bullet Heaven game.
You run around as a mouse while being chased by cats and ghosts, collecting orbs to then level up, selecting one of many different abilities. You’re limited to only four passive and four active abilities, which can also be levelled up and which will help you survive in the maze. So far, very fun. The twist, however, here is that time only moves when you move, very akin to SUPERHOT, which I find pretty darn glorious.
As it stands, the time-only-moves-when-you-move mechanic allows players to not just take a breather, step away for a while, maybe call their loved ones or grab a drink, but it also introduces a good amount of strategy and planning to the game.
Whenever you pick up a big experience orb, a new big orb (and some extra experience points) spawns somewhere else in the maze, hence incentivising you to go to those places, too, in order to get stronger and survive.
The issue is that the cats that follow you will go wherever you go, and sometimes they might even take a shortcut, which makes it harder. Furthermore, the ghosts will just ignore walls altogether, which is why skilled use of pathing and the screen-wrap is incredibly important… which is why it’s just great that you can just think sometimes. It doesn’t make the game easier or harder necessarily. It just feels like a very good quality of life mechanic – and less so like the puzzly and challenging mechanic from SUPERHOT, obviously.
Maze Mice is its very own thing that doesn’t feel like a copy or anything, and that translates down to its many different active abilities (or weapons, I guess?) and the way they create cool builds.
As previously mentioned, you can have four passive abilities (things like extra experience, more pick-up range, cooldown reduction, max health, and more) active at a time and four active abilities/weapons that will help you reduce enemy numbers. With a limited health pool and 25 damage taken per hit, it’s pretty important to thin out the number of cats and ghosts, which is why your arsenal needs to be perfected.
Sadly, however, you don’t necessarily have rerolls or skips or banishes quite yet (the game is in EA, so that might become a thing at some point), so you’ll need to improvise, strategise, and really just take your time with choices.
Taking a level-up for an existing ability means that you don’t have to settle for a new ability quite yet. Similarly, there are choices in what passive effects to go for and what can be improvised and made to work.
You don’t always find the “popcorn”, which gives you a dodge every x seconds, so maybe you’ll invest in health regeneration or maximum health instead. Sometimes you don’t find cooldown reduction, so you avoid the weapons that have a high cooldown. Sometimes, you just make do with what you’re given, and it works quite well.
Weapons-wise, we’ve got flaming trails, beams, dust, fleas, and more… It’s wacky as heck and I love that for it. On top of that, the game just released into Early Access and will receive more updates, but has already been released with 30 playable characters and a whole lot of items that you can find and experiment with. Also, throughout it all, you’re accompanied by music that just goes way too hard and which reminds me of Jetset Radio… so it’s great.
The game has a lot of item variety in terms of builds and items but it sometimes can feel like you see the same items over and over… And that’s mostly because items get unlocked via experience, which will obviously limit the item pool early on, but has the benefit of not overwhelming players on top of giving players something to look forward to.
That said, I do hope that the game gets tweaked a little so that it feels less reliant on items like Love and Popcorn. Being able to take a hit is pretty important, and it sometimes feels like two of your item slots are just occupied by those, creating a sense of urgency when you don’t run into them… and sometimes it just feels like you might have as well end it early if you don’t get those.
There are, obviously, other options, but they’re just not as good as healing a little every second or dodging once, if that makes sense.
This, however, is obviously very nitpicky of me, and again, the game just released, so, understandably, some of the items might be more or less balanced than others. For what it’s worth, the game has a lot of content already, despite being very early in its EA phase, and most of the items do feel viable to use.
If you’re looking for a more casual roguelike with strategy aspects, a great soundtrack, and pretty adorable art, Maze Mice is definitely a game worth checking out!
This post was originally written by Dan Dicere from Indiecator.
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