I wasn’t expecting Maze Mice to leave Early Access just two months after it arrived there, and had I known I think I would have been more prepared. Why? Because this is the next game from the creator of Luck be a Landlord, a really smart little deckbuilder-of-sorts about surviving in a landlord-induced hellscape of never-ending debt and gambling.
What is Maze Mice?
Developed by Trampoline Tales, Maze Mice is a top-down bullet heaven roguelite heavily inspired by all-time video game classic, Pac-Man. Playing as one of several cute little mice, you must scamper around a maze, grab up XP, choose new powers to zap the cats that are chasing you, and stay alive long enough to beat the boss.
Each new run takes you around a small and self-contained maze, and there are blue XP bubbles dotted all around the place. You’ve got to grab ’em up – especially the big ones – because once you do the XP resets somewhere else on the map, giving you a constant stream of new and immediate objectives to aim at.
Thus you must ping between targets and grab experience points while dodging attacks, however, a key twist sees time stop whenever you do. Simply take your finger off the directional button and the action will completely freeze, chasing cats and all. It’s like Superhot meets Mouse Trap.
The aforementioned kitties are a bit more dangerous than the old ghosts in Pac-Man. At first your enemies will chase you up and down, left and right, but always in your slipstream. However, it’s not long before your enemies are floating about the place and walking through walls, always drifting towards you like a murder of crows.
Amazing Mice
The screen will quickly fill up with a huge clowder of cats, and the art of the game is in judging where they’re going to be and making sure that you have enough time to get past them before they arrive there. Failure to do so will result in a small health penalty, and four or more hits and you’ll be cat food. It’s not all doom and gloom, though.
You see, your little micey friends have some rather special abilities. As you play longer, advance further, and earn more XP, you unlock more special powers for your available pool, and then you can choose a new one – or an upgrade of one chosen previously – every time you level up. For reference, it works much like it does in Vampire Survivors, it’s just the arena and your movements around it are more focused here.
Over the course of a run – and run is the operative word here – you can choose from an ever-expanding array of thematic tools. I don’t want to spoil this part of the game, because playing with your new abilities is part of the fun in Maze Mice, but I’ll give you one example. My favourite unlock so far are the flea bombs, which damage enemy cats slowly over time, jumping from victim to victim. Another favourite of mine is one of the starting abilities, which leaves a trail of flames behind you, burning any feline that follows in your footsteps.
The game is constantly broken up by these little decisions, and this cadence of choice, coupled with the time-stopping mechanic, makes this a surprisingly chill game of cat and mouse. Yes, there are panicky moments where I was frantically trying to get myself out of a bind, but for the most part I felt in control, relaxed, and like I was having…
Good old fashioned fun
Maze Mice isn’t a particularly complicated game, but it does offer playful nuance as you advance through its loop of unlocks and experimentation. The bullet heaven format has been stripped back enough for it to be pushed through a mouse hole but in the process, the simple essence of the formula has been allowed to shine within the confines of the game’s tightly-packed single-screen arenas.
Trampoline Tales is proving to be a developer to watch; Maze Mice is a wildly different but equally engaging follow-up to Luck be a Landlord. The indie developer has managed to make a bullet heaven game that feels fun, fresh, and engaging. I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to see what genre they decide to take on next…
Maze Mice is out now on PC (Lin, Mac, Win) and I played the game via access provided by the developer’s PR buds – thanks for that 🙂
