When I think of veterans of the indie game space, Edmund McMillen and Tyler Glaiel immediately come to mind, from success with flash games on Newgrounds, to more in-depth collaborative efforts with games like The End is Nigh, Mewgenics joins the ranks of absurd but addictively unique titles that effortlessly blend disparate ideas into one cohesive package.
Mewgenics is a real-time strategy game with role-playing elements that places players in the role of an unnamed lab assistant working for an eccentric mad scientist. The objective is to acquire cats for a variety of bizarre experiments and misadventures. While the game frames this task as procurement, Mewgenics is ultimately focused on cultivating the strongest possible litter.
In practice, this means taking in stray cats, sending them out to fight enemies and gather food, breeding them, and repeating the cycle. The goal is constant improvement as players refine their rosters and produce increasingly capable offspring through careful selection and management.
Breeding, which takes place every night, can result in offspring inheriting valuable skills from their parents, making them viable for continued progression within the gameplay cycle. Before exploring those systems further, it is helpful to outline the basic gameplay loop in Mewgenics.
Players begin with a modest home for their feline companions, one that requires a steady supply of food to remain functional. While players are free to indulge the fantasy of becoming an obsessive cat hoarder, doing so quickly causes essential resources, particularly food, to dwindle. To obtain food and other valuable supplies, players must send their squad of cats into the streets of Boon County. This is where the game’s roguelike real-time strategy elements come into play.
Mewgenics is broken up into several distinct biomes or worlds, each featuring 3-4 battles, including boss encounters and random RNG-based rooms that feature classic roguelike risk versus reward mechanics. Players start close to home in the neighbourhood, as they progress, however, the game opens up into dark alleyways, garbage dumps, sewers, caves, and other urban environments that meld together gross, yet strangely endearing imagery that brings to mind games like The Binding of Isaac, Super Meat Boy and other classic Flash games from the golden age of the internet.
Because Mewgenics combines roguelike systems with a real-time tactics structure, it features a wide range of RNG-based modifiers. These include equipment, consumables and a variety of unique moves and abilities that cats can acquire as they progress. The sheer volume of modifiers is impressive and stands out as one of the game’s strongest features. Notable abilities include a ranged healing shot and the ability to teleport to grass tiles or injured allies. Even simpler skills, such as grab and roll, proved invaluable in specific high-risk situations, including encounters with bosses that blanket the map with area-of-effect traps.
“The sheer volume of unique modifiers is staggering and one of the best elements of Mewgenics.”
When it comes to gear and equipment, Mewgenics offers an eclectic mix of outlandish and largely useful items for cats to equip. These range from clown noses to buckets of lard and small bags of catnip. Both items and stat modifiers frequently reference popular media, adding a layer of levity to the game’s otherwise dark humour. This approach feels fitting for a title that evokes the spirit of a beloved, long-lost Flash era game, from a time when parodying popular culture was commonplace.
On that note, Mewgenics also features a really great soundtrack with songs that feel appropriate for its gritty urban setting, right at home with the alley-cat vibe the game seems to adopt, with its grey aesthetic and colourful RNG-based cast of mangey cats. Humour in Mewgenics is on point, with the sound design for the cats themselves all sounding off-kilter, with many of them sounding obviously human, which adds to the craziness of the game, further accentuated by the sometimes fugly and furry freaks that pop out of your cats after a frisky night of catnip and chill.
Random events in Mewgenics, which take place between battles, are also an interesting highlight of the game, with the tactics-based title not shying away from a good amount of toilet humour, often requiring your cats to sift through poop or find treasure inside literal toilets. There is always something gross around the corner, which can sometimes lead to powerful boons that help you along your journey.
The central crux of Mewgenics, which some people may initially be turned off by, is the fact that the game wants you to make peace with the fact that you will have to move on from your already-deployed cats. In other words, once you complete a run in Mewgenics, by returning home, which requires the player to get through the map, opting to either go further into the game world, which unlocks new biomes, or make a beeline to the exit, your returning squad of felines will become retired and will no longer be able to go into battle.
“Humour in Mewgenics is on point, with the sound design for the cats themselves all sounding off-kilter, with many of them sounding obviously human, which adds to the craziness of the game.”
At first, this might sound like a bad thing. Still, in truth, a retired cat is a valuable asset, as it allows for breeding for powerful offspring, on top of acting as currency to be traded in to the various NPC vendors that make up the hub area of Mewgenics. On the topic of NPCs, Mewgenics features unlockable character classes, which unlock over time, and can be purchased from a store, in addition to other special unlocks, such as expanded storage for your inventory, and even the option to make your house larger, which further allows the player to furnish it with a collection of curios and oddities that add further modifers to the game.
If you’re a fan of either Edmund McMillen or Tyler Glaiel’s work and are a lover of cats, Mewgenics is the cat’s meow and an absolute must-play, even if you’re someone who tends to shy away from either the RTS or Roguelike genre, Mewgenics’s utterly unique premise is worth checking out if are in the mood for something that scratches that itch for something different, that only a cat-crazy game can do.
