Mewgenics (2026)

if you like tactical roguelites with tons of strategy and combos then this is an absolute must have. I play games daily and this has been the game that i personally enjoyed more than anything else the last few years.

Between all of the hundreds items , passive , and active abilites you will find so many fun and unique ways to succeed.

My only problem was with some of the UI on the battlefield being cluttered as well as the breeding system being alittle confusing and tedious ; but once i got passed that part of the game i was optimistic and excited for my team every single time.

Mewgenics (Steam) - Un roguelite y encima táctico, la verdad que es mi cosa. Me ha gustado bastante el juego, es muy original, la OST es una pasada y el juego tiene un sentido del humor super guay. No obstante, no me ha gustado demasiado la parte de la crianza, ese bucle de fallar misiones cuando una va mal, y en general lo largas que son las runs que se pueden arruinar literalmente tan solo porque un gato decide coger por algún motivo ébola. El RNG es demasiado importante en este juego, y cuando fallas no solo no consigues nada, sino que retrocedes, eso ha hecho que no saque el 100% del juego porque había quest que acababan siendo absurdas. He sentido que no respetaba mi tiempo, y el juego es un pozo de horas además, pero buen jueguito, lo retomaré mas adelante seguramente.

Lots to like here, but a few nitpicks that ultimately had me bouncing before seeing the end credits.

The sense of humor is great, the writing is wickedly funny and the songs are total ear-worms. Catchy and hilarious lyrics. Splendidly done.

I'm really not a fan of the visuals and that's not to say they aren't done well for the style they're going. Everything just looks gross, which again is the point, but it doesn't mean I have to like it. Too flash game-y for me and I never thought "oh that looks neat" instead of "blech, that is disgusting"...usually while laughing, so points for that!

Core gameplay is very strong. Mixing and matching jobs/collars and abilities, along with the 10x10 grid battles are terrific. When you get overpowered and just stomp a room you feel like some kind of cat god.

I think what crushed my spirit was in the later acts, I lost patience. Runs take a VERY long time and progress can feel glacially paced (I spent 25 hours into the game and only managed 15% progress).

Trying to figure out breeding/mutations at the main base is what really soured me. I just wanted to do another run and trying to individually select a prospective cat through dozens in my home just felt like homework. God forbid I build up a cat and they die on a run, which is easy to do in later runs.

Overall, well worth a play if you're into roguelikes or tactical strategy games. This is a neat hybrid of both, something I haven't seen too much of. I just couldn't quite get there to the end.

Mewgenics is an unbelievably fun roguelike from Edmund McMillen, who kind of stylishly releases games every few years that just happen to be some of the best games that I’ve ever played, including The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, which is my all-time favorite game. So many of his titles, like this one and The End Is Nigh, Super Meat Boy, and maybe another one that I’m forgetting, not Legend of Bumbo, although that one game wasn’t that bad, each time he puts something out that is creatively unique while being consistent with his style and maximalist design approach. Edmund is somebody who seems to just have an intuitive understanding of what makes games addictive. I think he knows better than any player what makes a game addicting. And in an industry where ideas are constantly being sampled and reused and reinvented from other game series or other developers, I love to see that Edmund McMillen really just tends to reinvent his own ideas.

There’s really nothing about Mewgenics that is derivative. There might be a stray influence here and there from something modern, or a reference, but really rarely is there anything obvious. I’m thinking, for example, like from Slay the Spire, you can upgrade your abilities. And in this game there is an ability upgrade mechanic that is aesthetically similar. But even that is not really very similar. It’s that kind of influence where it’s just a small cog in this large machine that has been drawn from somewhere else.

Other than that, the ideas, especially the artistic ideas, the visuals, the music, which is fantastic, by the way, the themes contained within, the silliness, the story, the writing, all of it, it just feels so singular as an Edmund McMillen project. It really is such a natural extension from The Binding of Isaac. In fact, in many ways, it feels like a sequel to The Binding of Isaac, not just narratively, but also mechanically, other than the fact that the games are two different genres.

So much is borrowed under the hood from The Binding of Isaac, but not in terms of gameplay, more so in terms of maximalist design philosophy, where the core gameplay loop is flavored by addictiveness. The one more run feeling is incredibly strong, and that’s powered a lot of the time by the variety in the gameplay and the huge number of skills and the fact that you’ll never really truly have the same team or even a remotely similar team, just due to the sheer number of classes, abilities, and items that manipulate how the game is played.

It’s really quite incredible how many different mechanics coexist simultaneously and how it all really just works. Occasionally, you will get a game-breaking run in either a very positive or a very negative direction, where maybe there’s some extreme tension between two of your abilities or an extreme synergy between them that really scales the difficulty in one direction or another. But even that is just so much fun to observe and is not any different than The Binding of Isaac, where that same sort of thing existed. And in fact, it was far more purposefully utilized, I think, in The Binding of Isaac. These game-breaking synergies were something that you could really manipulate once you understood the mechanics well. You could manipulate it pretty easily.

My experience, 50 or so hours into Mewgenics, is that the game is far more balanced. Now, of course, look, this is a challenging game. It’s a game in which the runs can get very long once you unlock all the paths available. And it’s a game that I don’t think you can really fully explore easy paths to success until you’ve accumulated a ton of hours, I mean like hundreds of hours.

But the majority of the game is on these adventures where you’re sending your cats out to go to battle. You have a team of four cats who each are assigned to a different class, and you can pick that at the beginning of each run, but then you are also getting a randomized set of skills. Through level-ups, you have control over how your cats develop, so there’s a lot of chance and there’s also a lot of player control. And the tension between that, between chance and control, is just like Isaac at the core of the game’s fun. You don’t feel fully beholden to chance because that would just be ridiculous, but you also are never really totally in control because that would be just too easy.

So the game is always interesting to set back up, even though you know what’s coming as far as the enemy types for each map and the bosses for each map, and even just how some of the maps are set up. There are some expectations that are pretty set. But that familiarity is a big part of the fun in many ways because you’re always testing whether or not your team, as you have developed it and how chance has taken over in some ways, can meet the threshold of beating that boss for whatever map you are currently on.

And besides the fact that there’s a lot of content you’ll be familiar with as you redo runs over and over again, which, by the way, is the exact same thing as Isaac, this game has a huge number of paths. There’s three acts, and in each act there are multiple paths, and within those paths there are sometimes multiple bosses, and there’s just a huge number of events and a huge number of items you come across. So everything really, at least 50 hours in, feels incredibly fresh.

I have almost 50 percent of the game unlocked, and I’m really quite good at strategy RPGs, and I’ve been playing them for a couple decades. And yet I’m finding the game just fully replete with content and challenge and mystery and excitement. And that’s not even to go into the home mechanics where you are breeding cats. It’s such a fundamental part of the gameplay because you’re able to manipulate what strengths and weaknesses your cats have as far as mutations and stats before you go into your runs. The system is not particularly deep, but it is pretty addicting and it is beholden to chance in a lot of ways. Yet you have a lot of time to work on things and tweak and tinker with the cats in your house.

So over a long period of time you’re able to develop some interesting cats with a wide mix of abilities. And by the way, at some point class mixing becomes an element of the gameplay and you’re able to create classes that borrow skills from other classes. So the possibilities are really truly endless.

There’s nothing really more I could say other than I wish I was playing the game right now because it just really is so fun. And this is definitely going to go down as one of my favorite games of all time, right behind Isaac.

If I were to praise something about this game it's that it has a very clear, passionate vision and style to it that has obviously guided it's creation with a great deal of passion. This is a very lovingly crafted game and clear to me a lot of joy was taken in it's making.

If this kind of humor speaks to you, you'll probably love it. I wish I enjoyed it more. the main obstacle is probably that tactics grid based combat isn't fun to grind. it's fun to approach with great consideration for about 30ish battles but to do it over and over and over hundreds of times just to furnish the resources you need, it's tiring. even on maximum speed.

The fun does arrive, when you start getting to do the actual eugenics. Because your cats are shit at first, and ill prepared to go far. you're going to have to breed useful ones, or just be masterfully good at utilizing what you have. and the journey to reaching that point is a steep one, while you grind out the needed currency. You will never have enough currency for what you need. each run you can return with a pittance and maybe after a couple handfuls of them, if you haven't lost your patience with it, you can advance your cause a little.

I can see from other reviews that many are having a good time with this and the grind isn't bad for them. I'm happy that I'm in the minority here. Because this is a good game. there's a lot of depth here if you have either the patience or the passion for the gameplay to get there. I wish that was me. I really do.

i'm so split on if i want to get this game. i'm sure plenty of people will think i'm super uncool for this but i just don't find this type of "haha cats are humping eachother XD" humor to be funny and the artstyle and everything is just gross. on top of that, looking at screenshots, the grayscale effect makes everything blend together and i feel i would have a hard time grasping things.

on the other hand, the dev has talked a big game about how deep and complex the game is and i like a good strategic roguelike game and apparently it's good. so... i guess i'll try it...

Article: Hands-On With Mewgenics, An Ambitious (And Hilarious) New Breed Of Strategy Game by Marcus Stewart

“I’m saying something, and I don’t know exactly what I’m saying yet, but I’m doing my best at being honest with what it is that I’m saying and what I’m talking about,” says McMillen. “And a lot of it has to do with what will happen to my children when I’m no longer here. What legacy will I leave for them, and what genetics have I passed to them? What disadvantages and advantages will those genetics have? And really, kind of going against what the name of the game is. The game is called Mewgenics. It’s about eugenics, but the game is more about being okay with stuff that you would otherwise want to discard, if you have the ability to do so.”