Only in an Edmund McMillen game can you expect to hop into the settings to find a toggle for “Humping Animations”. Mewgenics is a tactical RPG roguelike from Edmund McMillen (The Binding of Isaac, Super Meat Boy) and Tyler Glaiel (The End Is Nigh). As the name suggests, your party is comprised of cats with special abilities. But because this is a roguelike, you can’t get too attached to your cats because you lose them when they die. So how does the game continue? By breeding your cats and passing on those special abilities to the next generation, of course.
Humping animations? Of course I left that shit on.
The moment I started up Mewgenics, I was immediately greeted with that trademark gross, off-putting art style that’s practically synonymous with McMillen’s games at this point. Humans and cats are alike were presented with disproportionately large heads and weirdly warped features. The cats, in particular, who are supposed to be the stars of Mewgenics, looked delightfully messed up and macabre.
I mean, just look at these little misfits. This is a group of cats with faces that literally only their mothers could love.
Don’t expect to find any remotely normal-looking cats in Mewgenics. For a game that’s all about cat breeding and using them to beat up sewer monsters, I found it particularly brave and morbidly comedic of Mewgenics to make its star characters look so utterly repulsive. Even Cult of the Lamb — a game that’s all about messed up lambs — couldn’t bring itself to make its lambs look anything short of adorable.
Once you get past the unsettling aesthetic, though, you’ll find that Mewgenics houses a fantastic tactical RPG with plenty of depth and nuance. To start, every run kicks you off with four cats, and you’ll need to choose Collars (read: classes) for them. There are Cleric, Fighter, Tank, and Mage Collars, just to name a few, and plenty more to unlock as you complete more runs. By equipping a Collar on a cat, they’ll be able to learn class-specific abilities as they level up. For instance, a Cleric cat’s basic moves will damage enemies but heal allies, and as it levels up, it’ll learn more useful abilities like buffs and other enhancements.
Having a balanced party is key, especially at the start, as you’ll want to have cats specialized in all kinds of damage types. Melee-only cats can be powerful, but they lack range, which means chances are good they’ll get pelted to death before they even reach their foe due to their limited mobility. Ranged and magic-based cats can have limited mobility too, but if you’re lucky enough, you might be able to learn abilities with infinite range (yes, this is a thing in Mewgenics) to completely bypass those limitations.
I think that’s what makes Mewgenics so special, despite its occasional crippling difficulty spikes. I had a particularly lucky run with a Mage cat who not only had infinite range on all its abilities, but was also able to freeze enemies every turn. This applies to boss fights as well, which means that I could effectively stop a boss from taking any action at all the entire fight, and just slowly chip away at it. It was easily one of the most broken cats I had in my entire time with Mewgenics, and I appreciated how willing the game was in giving players this much power and agency.
Normally, though, the bosses can be pretty unforgiving. The first couple biomes are still pretty manageable, but once you get past that, you’ll start encountering bosses with some nasty moves. I’d gotten my first loss in an encounter with a spider boss who could not only summon adds, but also root you to the spot, forcing you to waste a turn to struggle before you can take another action. To make things even trickier, Mewgenics has a sort of built-in timer system that prevents you from dragging fights out for too long. After a set number of turns, your cats start to get tired, which means they recover less mana and their moves become less effective. It’s punishing, but it also means you’re really forced to think carefully about what you’re doing at all times. It’s thrilling.
In between runs, you’ll go back to your hideout, where you can breed cats and interact with NPCs. The way Mewgenics is structured, you’re forced to retire after reaching certain milestones, which can be a bit of a bummer. After hitting a milestone, you’ll automatically go back to base and end a run. And each time a run ends, all cats who went on that run have to retire, which means you can’t use them in future runs. So if you had a really overpowered cat, it can sometimes feel a little bad because you weren’t able to really maximize that cat’s potential and get all the value you could out of them. It’s all part of Mewgenics‘ balance, though; sometimes you’ll be blessed by the RNG gods with some insanely disgusting abilities, but you can never take them for granted.
The good news is that these abilities have a chance of getting passed on to the next generation of cats. Cue the humping animations. By resting each night, two cats may decide to procreate and give birth to a kitten, which will inherit skills or passives from its parents. Once that kitten is fully grown — which takes just a couple of in-game days — you can take them out on a run. Not all cats are compatible, though, so it’s not always guaranteed that you’ll be able to pass on your skills. Randomly generated kittens do show up at your hideout each day, so there’s never a risk of soft-locking yourself, but there is always a pervading sense of having to start from scratch each time a run ends.
You’ll also be able to interact with a group of unsavory NPCs who all look like they either want to torture your cats or ruin your life in some small, unimaginable way. But interacting with them is the only way to get permanent upgrades to make future runs easier, so interact I shall. By donating cats to these NPCs, you can expand your hideout, buy items, and increase your inventory size, among other things. True to Mewgenics‘ crusty aesthetic, donating cats never feels good, especially as these NPCs salivate and drool over your cats with what can only be described as an unhealthy obsession. The game reassures you at the start that no cats were harmed in the making of Mewgenics of course, but I absolutely loved its commitment to making the player feel as uncomfortable as possible.
At the time of writing, I have a few completed runs under my belt, though my review guide tells me there’s over 200 hours of content to sink my teeth into. And I believe it. Despite presenting itself as a somewhat linear game at the start, there are so many secrets and hidden items and paths to uncover in Mewgenics, and I suspect — just like The Binding of Isaac — that it’ll be months before every little secret and easter egg is discovered by the player base.
Mewgenics is an unflinchingly and unapologetically off-putting game that isn’t afraid to roll around and play in the muck. Look past its comically unappealing veneer, however, and you’ll find that there’s plenty for tactical RPG fans to love here. From the endless customization to the genius design of the bosses and levels, Mewgenics is a must-play for fans of both tactical RPGs and roguelikes.
A review code for the game was provided by the publisher. You can check out our review policy here. Reviewed on PC.
