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.
