Mewgenics Review: One Cat-astrophically Good Roguelite

Edmund McMillen has never made a normal game. Super Meat Boy put you through a meat grinder for fun. The Binding of Isaac threw Bible imagery at you while you fought monsters in a basement. So when he and Tyler Glaiel announced a game about breeding mutant cats and sending them on tactical adventures, nobody really batted an eye. Of course that’s what they were making next. What nobody expected was for Mewgenics to be this good, and after 50-plus hours with it, I’m still a little surprised by how much I’ve enjoyed it.

The home base loop is where Mewgenics earns its weirdest comparisons. You’re managing a cat household: feeding them, cleaning up after them, assigning rooms, and watching your cats breed, brawl, or occasionally eat each other. It plays like The Sims if The Sims was designed by someone who found the chaos funnier than the cozy parts. What I found genuinely impressive is how much the genetics system does for replayability. No two cats are the same, and every litter produces something new, something strange, and sometimes something you really didn’t plan for. That unpredictability keeps the home loop engaging in a way I didn’t expect going in.

Once you send four of them out into the field, Mewgenics becomes a grid-based tactical RPG that fans of Fire Emblem, XCOM, or Darkest Dungeon will recognize immediately. Class collars work like D&D archetypes: fighters, mages, clerics, thieves, and more. Combat is positional, environmental hazards interact with your abilities, and cat synergies run deeper than the game initially lets on. Fifty hours in, I was still discovering combinations I hadn’t seen before, which is the kind of thing that’s hard to fake. The depth is real.

The stakes keep runs meaningful. Cats can pick up permanent injuries, gain mutations from random events, or simply not make it back. When they retire or die, they’re gone, but their genes carry forward into the next litter. It creates a genuine attachment to cats you’ve only had for a few runs, and losing a good one hurts more than it probably should for a game about cartoon cats.

Ridiculon, who worked with McMillen on The Binding of Isaac, delivers one of the better game soundtracks I’ve heard in a while. The 1960s setting opens the door to rockabilly, swing, and doo-wop, and the music shifts naturally between instrumental while you’re exploring and full vocals when a major battle hits. The in-game radio station WMEW 99.9 is a nice touch that makes the home hub feel lived-in. It all fits the tone of the game better than it has any right to.

One fair warning: this is a McMillen game. The gross-out humor is here, the content goes to strange places, and the visuals are not for everyone. But if that’s your kind of thing, or you can look past it, Mewgenics is one of the most replayable and mechanically rich games I’ve played this year. McMillen has called it the best game he’s ever made. After spending this much time with it, I think he might be right.

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