I’m old enough to remember when Mewgenics was announced, all the way back in 2012. At the time, I wasn’t even writing about games — I was in secondary school, and playing the hell out of The Binding of Isaac. In that sense, this is like the Indie GTA 6 for a lot of people, with some formidable shoes to fill. Expectations are high, but it also feels like this one is kind of coming out of nowhere? Regardless, I’m pleased to report that Edmund McMillen (and longtime collaborator Tyler Glaiel) have not lost the sauce or rested on their laurels.
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Mewgenics is a dauntingly enormous and persistently surprising game, a masterfully designed roguelite with hundreds of hours of content at its disposal. The ludicrous nature of its premise — breeding dynasties of extremely powerful cats and sending them on a journey to hell — allows the game to take on the insane timbre of an episode of Smiling Friends, with a heaped dose of toilet humour, for good measure.
The unique reactivity of the game’s hazardous environments and the ridiculous pool of items, events, and abilities mean that you might fail a run, but then dawn on a great experimental leap forward for your dark project back at home base. This manic, moreish loop makes Mewgenics extremely difficult to put down, and the fact that you can easily take your playthrough on the move with a Steam Deck makes this a fundamentally dangerous start to 2026 for anyone who fancied playing a variety of games this year.
The Itty Bitty Crit-y committee
So here’s the setup — at the start of the game, you are carroled by the questionable accelerationist scientist Doctor A. Beanies, to take two of his cat specimens, a male and a female, for generational genetic manipulation reasons. He sends you out on The Path, which takes shape as the first of many classic roguelike overworld screens that you move through, picking battles, events, shop tiles, and bosses, depending on how hardy you’re feeling about this iteration of your cat army.
As you proceed, you’ll unlock new collars for your cats (classes, basically) that allow you to designate Tanks, Clerics, Mages & more, with plenty of room for experimentation on the road. As you wrap up encounters and move through the maps, your cats will pick up items, illnesses, and injuries, but also level up, allowing you to pick new synergetic abilities that match your statistical setup and the equipment you’ve collected. Your cats have a wide range of actives and passives to play with, and you can multiclass eventually to create absolutely house-wrecking monster felines (and terrible mutants that simply don’t work, but also teach you something about the game’s design).
You’ll start in The Alley, where fellow cats and rats are your prey — but this soon changes as you venture to The Sewers, Junkyard, and beyond, where anthropomorphic night soil and tidal waves of sewage stand in your way. I’ll leave it there so as not to spoil just how esoteric the creature design gets, especially as it pertains to boss battles — but they’re often folded neatly into the narrative design of the area, and feature twists and phases that will shake your overprepared sense of confidence to the very core.
Many times have I believed ardently in the prowess of ‘this generation of cat progeny’ which I had developed whole wings of my home base for, only to be humbled, immediately, and sent back to the deficiency drawing board. It’s yuck, for sure, but by god is it compelling, and you’re constantly making fun choices about whether to shelve items and currency for the future, or deploy them for the chance to get past a progression blocker.
Curiosity killed the cat (army)
The unpredictability of Mewgenics is its superpower, and I loved discovering which environmental factors can completely flip a battle on its head. To take an early boss as an example, the Radical Rat acts like Bomberman, laying down timed explosives that fill out the playspace and force you to move out of position. When they’re not trapping you into a corner, they then turtle away to keep you at arm’s length. The fool that I am, I had built one of my cats to be a pyromancer, and while I saw this as highly useful against previous minibosses, there was a fatal moment where I set the brush in the arena on fire, which spread and triggered every bomb in proximity, and murdered my entire team.
Next time around, I managed to luck out and nurture a cat that would take an attack of opportunity whenever the boss dropped a bomb, clearing the board efficiently before I could suffer the consequences. With my second-in-command wielding a stun ability, the former nightmare was a total cakewalk — and this is truly the tip of the iceberg as far as in-game synergies are concerned. There’s so much to engage with in a typical brawl, from enemies that spirit away quickly but drop highly useful items, hazards on a timer, and rocks you can push around to bray enemies into walls.
The opportunity space is frankly absurd, but you are limited, cleverly, by the fact that cats must retire after an adventure. Like fusion in the Persona games, you can inherit certain traits from your favourite warriors by getting them in the mood, but ultimately, they are doomed after a run, no matter your performance, so don’t get too attached, as they’ll end up in the bin eventually, even if their weaknesses and strengths live on.
The Hot Tin Roof
What makes Mewgenics such an incredible game is the audiovisual suite that ties it all together, beyond the memorable decisions that tie its sticky gameplay loop together. From Sewer Bossa Nova to thundering, twangy boss themes, the game’s soundtrack by Ridiculon is a magnificent achievement and will be hard to beat for its commitment to the bit. It also helps that it is backed by a frankly disgusting litany of squelchy sound effects and plenty of celebrity-cameo meows, to boot.
Naturally, every area I ventured through and all of the gross, hilarious flashpoints that destroyed or saved my runs also came packaged with the same thick-lined art style that McMillen’s lineage of games are known for, which helped tremendously in maintaining my interest throughout Mewgenic’s defining acts. It became a habit (and not just for staying alive) to meticulously scan a combat playspace to appreciate my surroundings as well as catch the tricks it had up its sleeve.
This helped Mewgenics rise, with startling momentum, to become one of my favourite tactics games of all time, and an experience I’m going to be sinking deeper into for the months to come — if only to tackle its cavalcade of side quests, meet its quirky cryptids, and embark on more ludicrous experimental synergies.
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The Verdict
An early shoo-in for Indie Game of the Year, Mewgenics is an immensely satisfying tactics game built from the ground up to enable word-of-mouth war stories about mutated felines. Few games can boast of having such a wealth of unique creatures and content, or item pools so bustling with build-breaking equipment that the allure of one more turn struggles to vanish. Herein lies a worthy successor to The Binding of Isaac that tackles an entirely new genre and evolves it in a nearly purr-fect direction.
