Haunted Mouse News

A Quick Update

Gaming magazine without PR nonsense

Published on March 24, 2026

Hey! I’m Alex Nitschke, founder of Haunted Mouse. Video games have always been my biggest passion—whether as a player, developer, or games journalist. I worked professionally in the latter field for 12 years. In Germany, I wrote under my birth name Alex Ney for outlets such as GameStar, GamePro, PC Games Hardware, and Yps.

At first, it was a pretty great job. But with competition from YouTube, Twitch, and similar platforms, the business side of games journalism started to wobble. These days, the whole field has been hit so hard that most outlets have practically thrown journalism overboard. Many now focus on news, advertorials, and nonsense guides; almost no topic or tactic is considered too low as long as it brings in clicks.

That development is not only unpleasant for many readers, but for plenty of journalists too—or so I’d argue. Because if you’re a creative person with actual taste and know-how, there’s just no joy in churning out one-dimensional PR fluff for the masses day after day. By 2024, the professional side of the industry had become creepy enough for me that I started thinking about alternatives; for myself and for readers. Then, not long after, my brain was struck by lightning: a magazine with no GTA, Fortnite, or WoW—but with sharp satire, clear opinions, and a little anarchy instead.

Allow me to introduce Mainstream Outside: an independent gaming magazine covering the world of video games—and nothing else. I gave the site the tagline “Gaming without battle passes. Takes without paywalls. And stories without Reddit,” and honestly, that says most of what needs saying. I hope it becomes a port of call for players who care about hidden gems, deeper analysis, and voices with a bit of bite.

That said, Mainstream Outside hasn’t been my only focus lately. There’ll also be fresh news from the game development front before long. Until then!

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The Tube Devlog #2

The Calm Before the Storm

Published on June 17, 2025

In our first devlog for The Tube, we introduced the East German escape background of our protagonist Annabelle. This time, we’d like to take a closer look at the game’s opening sequence. To give you a visual impression of where the journey begins, we’ve included a new screenshot from the first interactive scene: the shopping district of a peaceful small town somewhere in Germany.

Annabelle would love nothing more than to take a relaxed stroll through the shops, but she’s actually here for medical reasons. An MRI scan is scheduled for today, and while that may not sound dramatic, for Annabelle it’s a serious ordeal. She suffers from severe claustrophobia and being slid into a narrow MRI tube is just about the worst possible scenario for her.

Thankfully, her longtime friend Alex is only a phone call away. Though their bond is purely platonic, his presence on the line helps calm her nerves just enough so she can take in her surroundings. And that’s worth doing—for both her and for you. In The Tube, story scenes go beyond dialogue; they invite exploration.

By focusing the camera on specific objects in the environment, you can trigger fragments of Annabelle’s memory or unlock hidden story details. These insights may help you understand events more deeply or push you to question everything from a new angle. So while exploration isn’t mandatory, The Tube rewards curious players who look beyond the obvious with a rich layer of narrative discovery.

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Fly Hard Devlog #1

This Fly Has It Rough

Published on June 14, 2025

When we recently sat down to brainstorm fun game concepts for mobile platforms, we took a closer look at a few old-school 8-bit classics. One title stood out in particular: Space Taxi for the C64, a physics-based platformer from 1984. What impressed us wasn’t just the game’s brilliant and whimsical mechanics—it’s the fact that, to this day, no one has really recreated its unique charm. In our opinion, few games have managed to be that funny, clever, and satisfying all at once.

The main takeaway for us? Physics can be hilarious—as long as it's not delivered like a science lecture. So we asked ourselves: what would happen if, instead of piloting a heavy space taxi, you were navigating something light… like a fly? And just like that, Fly Hard was born.

However, Fly Hard isn’t Space Taxi with wings. It’s a vertical skill-based game that also uses auto-scrolling to raise the challenge and crank up the fun. Your goal in each of the game’s 20+ levels is to land a very unlucky fly named Flea onto a "tasty sidewalk pile." Naturally, Flea’s tragic little quest is met with all sorts of ridiculous hazards: gusty fans, slap-happy human hands, oversized spiders with an appetite, and sleepy "wall geckos" that still somehow manage to flick their tongues at her with deadly accuracy.

Right now, we’re hard at work on the game’s core mechanics—and we’ll be sharing the first screenshots very soon.

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The Tube Devlog #1

What The Tube Has to Do with the DDR

Published on July 22, 2024

No, you haven't stumbled onto some socialist propaganda site. The image on the left actually reveals something about the story of our survival horror game, The Tube. The depicted Brother’s Kiss between former DDR leader Erich Honecker and the head of the CPSU, Leonid Brezhnev, essentially sets the backdrop for our story.

You see, the protagonist of The Tube, Annabelle Schultze, was a citizen of the DDR, albeit a very young one. At just 5 years old, she fled the socialist regime with her parents by crossing the inner-German border. While this event occurred over three decades ago in The Tube's timeline, Annabelle will confront her past sooner than she would like.

To share tidbits like this, we launched this website. This news section is meant to serve as a blog that we'll gradually fill with interesting devlogs. However, since The Tube is still in a very early stage of development, we ask for your patience with vague language and a bit of secrecy at the outset. Unfortunately, experience shows that revealing an innovative game idea too early can lead to it being stolen and implemented by unscrupulous developers before the original even releases. To be clear, we don't think we're creating the next cutting-edge horror game. :) We just want to ensure that we can continue to enjoy developing The Tube.

Right now, we're almost full-time focused on story and character writing, as well as the soundscape for our game. While the story's main elements are already written and the main characters are mostly developed, we now need to complete and refine the narrative. You'll learn more about the story in upcoming devlogs – and much more.

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