A month ago, I was describing the first game I could recall playing to a friend that I have not been able to find. I played this game on a computer at a school library at a very young age, and I have pretty high confidence that it:

• Involved some kind of cartoony rodent (mouse or rat) and bubbles
• The game was rendered with a side perspective
• Was a 2D game with 3d-rendered sprites

However, given the time lapsed since I played this game, I think it's possible that I may have misremembered or made up some of these details. I would have played this game sometime between 1993 and 2000.

We tried searched for a bit on sites like My Abandonware and Internet Archive, but none of the results we found were right. The list of games we checked were:

• Rats! (Windows Game 1998)
• Rat Poker
• Marty and the Trouble with Cheese
• Cheese Terminator (1992)
• The Even More! Incredible Machine

Of these results, I thought Rat Poker was the closest, since it also involved a bunch of rats everywhere, some of them getting captured in bubbles, and it being a level depicted from the side.

It was at this point that I offered more potential details to my friend:

i think the bubbles floated up from the bottom

and the levels were very colorful, each level was timed, and you were trying to rack up a high score or something

honestly this is a game from like my very early childhood so i might have some details wrong

i asked gemini and it settled on the game being Dweebs or Dweebs 2 or (in its opinion, the most likely option) some other obscure shareware game from the time.

i think you were trying to save the mice from the bubbles or something but i'm not certain

This is the Moby Games page for Dweebs: https://www.mobygames.com/game/53000/dweebs-official-mutation-platinum-remix-release/screenshots/

Today, the same friend suggested Rodent's Revenge, but it wasn't this either.