Mewgenics is one of the most exciting Roguelikes I've ever played in years
Blog Andrew Joseph 10 May , 2025 0
It's weird to say a game about obsessed cats so you can send them into wild battles in the back alley, and the dirty sewers may end up being one of the most nuanced and thoughtful strategy games I've played in a long time, but that's exactly what I found Mewgenics. I've been doing my next Roguelike surgery with the creator of Isaac's Binder in the last few hours, although its original avatar is First announced Gundam 13 years agoseeing the version we are actually using, it immediately became one of my most anticipated games for the year.
The tone of Mewgenics is actually simple: You run a house full of cats that you can expand and upgrade every day and then take those cats out of the Roguelike run to upgrade them while collecting resources and items to take them home. Each run takes the form of a series of random encounters and grid-based tactical combat, where you have to weave together various cat-based attacks and abilities to remove various rats, bugs, and competitors’ toms and then backwards.
If you've played games like Darkest Dungeon, The Lamb, or Xcom, this setup might be a bit familiar, but Mewgenics does a lot to make it special. For beginners, each cat can only have one adventure and then retire on the couch and return to the comfort of his home (assuming you have a couch). This means that with the upgrades of the feline fighter are included in every run, and you won't try to build your favorite squad of Murbeer and then use them every time. I'm still attached to my heavy batsman, like a glass cannon called Jarvis, which melts the enemy's group due to the combination of passive abilities that first divide his basic range attack into multiple projectiles and then distribute each bounce to other enemies, but once the run is finished, this force plays a different role.
You will see that your cat goes home more than just sitting all day. They have unique personalities and desires, even their own cat friends and enemies. Place two compatible cats in a room with some fascinating decorations that they can…hit them. The next day, you will find yourself having a kitten that shares some of their traits and abilities. This is the crux of the larger Metagame in Mewgenics, when you mix and manipulate your pedigree to create future generations that can start running on a stronger basis. Things get more complicated as mutations and other effects are weaved, not to mention that you start to choose uncomfortable choices with inbred choices to keep certain traits “pure” at an ever-growing cost.
To my surprise, Mewgenics often asks me to choose my current run or choose between a bigger improvement in my home. For example, money can be used to purchase items midway through the store or upgrade, but this is also the currency you can use
Between them – some abilities even use it for powerful effects in combat, such as hiring a killer to help you. Likewise, it is possible to bring deviceable items back to the base and use them in a few future runs (if your limited storage is large enough to accommodate them), which gives you more control over the “build” you launch, but also makes you wonder if that limited consumption is worth using now or saving next time. Whenever the cat upgrades, you can also choose from a semi-random new ability choice and suddenly you have to consider what is useful now and what is most interesting to breed later.
There are also some very cool and unique abilities. At the start of each run, you can give your group of cats a collar, assign them to their class, adjust some of their starting abilities and statistics – so the Green Hunter is better at distance, while the Red Fighter is close and personal. Depending on their class and equipment, cats may experience dash attacks, teleportation, healing effects, elemental spells with their own interactions, and more. One of my favorite matches ended up being my necromancer's plague ability, doing a little damage Each Space on the board. That allowed me to soften the group and easily break the corpses so that they gave up the trophy and even intentionally weakened my own hunters to take advantage of the items that made them cause more damage in their low life.
This bustling decision to make the tapestry is what makes Mewgenics fight shine during the demonstration. Its earliest encounter is very approachable on the surface, especially when learning ropes, but there is one Deep It's great to get lost for those who really want to optimize. The order in which you sort your actions in any given turn may waste the advantages of both big and small. Where you can move, or where you think the next turn needs it, may be seriously important compared to the enemy's choice. Even spell management of spells can become its entire kid game as you try to save on more expensive abilities or blow it all to cheaper features.
It may not be surprising to hear developers Edmund McMillen and Tyler Glaiel compare this combat system to magic in depth, perhaps, that their party and the philosophy of its creator Richard Garfield, are about to introduce the huge system and let them explore it – I think the comparison is surprising. It's by no means a card-based Roguelike way you might think of killing spires or monster trains, but as a big fan of myself, I can hear the gears in my brain rolling over its encounter in a similar way. Thinking about how one ability interacts with another, how my movements cascade into later turns, and how to combine cat load with larger neko-potence.
There are also many things to consider. McMillen and Glaiel told me they knew that compared to Isaac's binding force, they knew that Mewgenics would be immediately available, which is somewhat unfair when the game's size benefited from essentially a decade of content updates and DLC. Although Mewgenics was first announced by Super Meat Boy Developer Team Meat in 2012, it was eventually cancelled, and McMillen took the idea with him when he left, so the current avatar rebooted from Scratch about six years ago. Even so, they have withdrawn from all the docks while trying to hit the current version of the premium bar set by Isaac and say Mewgenics already has more items to find–even without the computing power, furniture pieces and other items.
Some are equipment that provides simple statistics, while others are weapons for your cat to attack specifically – for example, a bag of rock leaves bruises or fire hoses that push everything away. There are also trickier items, such as a playing card, which can make any spell effect exactly the effect of one or two spells, or a poisonous can that will make your attack poison poison poison, but at the beginning of the battle there will be poisons for every unit, including allies. Some items are also part of a set that gives the cat all the benefits of wearing all the pieces – on the one hand, I stumbled upon all three parts of the launcher kit, each of which somehow hindered the wearer while providing a gain for the entire team. Obviously, I was lucky enough to find them, but if not, I could store them in my home and watch the missing pieces from the subsequent run.
McMillen and Glaiel said that despite this, their test-based estimates are that it will take an astonishing 200 hours to beat the end boss of the Mewgenics story. Initially, each run sends your sequence in the same order of three regions, with the last of each stage having a boss, but there are more than a dozen other sequences to discover and fight. There are major and optional tasks that require you to find certain items, get to a certain location, or cast a certain number and various cats for their eclectic characters. Not to mention all the special furniture you can find to decorate your home and make it as cute as your precious kittens, which have their own statistics or effects. There is one a lot of Go beyond Roguelike's core tactics.
In my hands-on class, I even jumped up to face one of the many bosses who could attack your house at all levels throughout the story, and then this gave me a project I needed to run back into another race to go further. While most enemies have fun little quirks like giant sharks kill a cat immediately, move slowly, or hide it as a cat inanimate at the end of the turn to test your memory, bosses push you further strategy. The slippery Boris is a destructive ball that moves towards anyone hitting, while the aggressive mouse will throw away the bomb, which can be avoided or eliminated.
But the best part about every major boss I've seen and some areas outside of the battle has to be music. They all come with jazz tunes, and the lyrics match the mood of fighting. This is an unconventional choice so It was great throughout, and it was a great example of how weird any fan of Isaac could recognize and admire. Not afraid to get rough and uncomfortable, but somehow manages to make a game full of cats and poop attacks not feel teenager. OK, OK most – But it still proves that every strange thing here is a carefully considered style choice, not just a cheap shocking humor attempt.
To be honest, I can't wait to play more Mewgenics because it speaks my language in six different ways. Aside from not digging out things like trait inheritance and upgrading yourself, the main problem I left behind is that the cycle of breeding cats and the cycle of bringing them out of battle will last here for hundreds of hours. After just a few runs, it's impossible to really understand the lasting power of such a game – things like enemy breeds, horizontal layouts and difficulty adjustments are all about being the difference between enjoying roguelike for weeks or years. But I able Confidently, my playing was hiking enough to make us very excited.
