I stopped playing Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave to review Mewgenics. An 80+ hour fantasy epic, temporarily shelved to play a poop humour game about cats. I am really unsure how to feel about that, but we can figure it out between us I think.
Mewgenics is a portmanteau (a blend of two words). Mew, for the sound a cat makes, and eugenics, which I’m not going to get into on a light entertainment website, but safe to say it involves breeding and genetics. Described by Edmund McMillen Games Inc. as “the ultimate turn-based cat tactics and breeding roguelite”, it’s hard to argue with that incredibly specific descriptor.
How does this actually translate into minute-by-minute gameplay though? Mewgenics is a game of two halves. Unsurprisingly, you could summarise them as “tactics” and “breeding”. The “tactics” is the roguelike element. You’ve seen it a million times, travel down a map full of random events, shops, and enemy encounters. Kill a boss, choose a path, move on to the next map until you clear your goals or die trying and reset.
In this case, you control a party of up to four cats. You can equip traditional RPG classes to them through unlockable collars, level them up to earn new skills, fill out up to five equipment slots with items you earn on a run (and can take back home to use between runs on occasion), and get stuck with life-altering traits and curses that can be both good and bad for those poor little felines. Then, if any of them survive the experience, you can progress through the overall narrative, probably unlock something new, and all your surviving fur balls are officially “retired” and you all head home.
This is the “breeding” part of the equation. At your homestead you can pick up strays, do some shopping, shove cats in a big pipe (I’ll get to it, don’t worry), and end the day. Ending the day causes a bunch of events to happen in the house. Any cat currently sat in your house has the chance to breed or fight with another cat. Fighting causes injuries and status effects. Breeding causes… well… more cats.
You only tend to get one stray a day, so breeding quickly becomes your main method of obtaining new units to continue your adventures. It’s also probably the best way of doing so, because when two cats breed they have a chance to pass down the abilities they earnt through leveling up to their offspring. Sadly, this is also one of the more frustrating aspects of the game, due to how random the process is. The amount of times one of my Rangers ended up breeding with a tank, giving me a frail bodied kitten that just wants to take hits, or even more annoying, someone with a huge amount of buffs for ranged skills that only knows melee attacks, is too many to count.
I also need to touch on what I said earlier about cats and pipes. If you hadn’t guessed by the title, the sense of humour in Mewgenics can be described as dark at best, crude at worst. From the mind that spawned The Basement Collection (and probably most famously, Binding of Isaac), this is to be expected, but I know it certainly won’t be to everyone’s taste. Mechanically, this means that you can also use your cats as currency, sending them to various people by the pipes to unlock new items and features.
The characterisation of these characters ranges from funny and charming to outright offensive. This is very much what I would classify as edgy teenage humour, like the darker side of earlier TomSka sketches. It’s a shame, because I feel it may turn some people off what is an absolutely fantastic roguelite. However, I think on the other hand it’ll make this a vehicle in which people discover they like tactical games, so it’s a little difficult to say whether it’s good or bad, it just is.
That said, in summary, if you have played any of the previous Edmund games and know you can handle the vibe, or you just enjoy a good roguelike or tactical game, I truly cannot recommend Mewgenics enough (with the caveat about the tone, of course).
Mewgenics was reviewed on Xbox Series X, but is also available on Playstation 5, Nintendo Switch 2, and Steam.