As far as indie royalty is concerned, Mewgenics creator Edmund McMillen must be high up on that list, with a game development career that has seen the American first release Super Meat Boy in 2010 before knocking it out of the park with roguelike smash-hit The Binding of Isaac a year later. Mixing randomised Zelda-style dungeons with a mass of different items and builds, bullet-hell boss battles, and an art direction that was always on a knife-edge between slapstick and sadistic, Isaac set the template for many roguelikes to follow and put its creator firmly on the map of those to keep a close eye on.
While McMillen has had a few forays beyond Isaac expansions since that title, though – The End Is Nigh and The Legend of Bum-bo being two – neither release directly captured the mainstream public’s attention quite like the former. Step forward Mewgenics, then; on the face of it a turn-based tactical role-playing game involving the lives of cats, but like Isaac (on the face of it a simplistic dungeon-crawling shooter), hiding a deep ocean of content and complexity underneath that facade.
While Mewgenics has no relation to Isaac in terms of story, from a graphical and art style perspective, the two could be brothers, with the title’s off-the-wall monster designs, the humour of the characters, and general grotesque vibe of the world all ripped straight from the darkest recesses of McMillen’s creative mind. This is a world of hideous beasts and cats fighting for their lives, so it’s never going to be a pop of colour and vibrancy, but the randomised grids that make up the turn-based battle arenas are always so visually interesting that it never gets boring, and across the three acts with locales in the sewers, desert, a graveyard, and many others, there is plenty to admire. It’s also an experience that never takes itself too seriously in terms of audio, with ridiculously catchy songs throughout adventures, including hilarious vocal tunes during boss battles that have to be heard to be believed.
Along those lines, Mewgenics thrives on that skill of ensuring it never gets boring in any respect. Turn-based battles play out on those previously mentioned grids with every increasing difficulty and an AI that just never stops being as mean as it possibly can. Mini-bosses and end stage main bosses also add a host of different mechanics, with monsters that throw bombs or those that dish out huge area-of-effect hits ensuring that even when it seems like the player has a handle on a run, it can oh so quickly spiral out of control at the flip of a coin. Outside of combat, players progress through each stop along a forked road. Think Slay the Spire with its collection of battles, random encounters, loot, and shops.
The true stars of the show are the squad of four trusty cats taken into battle. Like many of these types of games, what starts out as just a collection of stats and attacks soon becomes the most important quartet of kitties around. Each cat starts off with a random set of abilities and can be assigned the usual RPG class roles – everything from tank, to ranger, to cleric – which all further specialise the team.
The random nature of those skills might seem difficult to navigate at first, but the beauty of Mewgenics is that it really makes the player consider the many, many, many strategic synergies that can play out and just how useful they can be. One squad could be tailored to have a powerful tank that has knockback abilities backed up by a team of mages and healers. Another squad might be all about utilising environmental attacks or exploiting backstab buffs on enemies. It’s not an exaggeration to say that alongside the endless items that can also tailor builds, the level of strategic possibilities are mind-blowing.
While the many cats that the player will collect, battle and breed largely follow a few set patterns of design, the sheer amount of trauma these kitties will go through means that by the end of any runs it’s impossible not to get attached when they end up with mangled bodies and broken faces. So many times, as the weary squad just about survives another combat encounter, it’s poignant looking at a bruised and battered team of cats that have been through so much – and so getting them back home alive suddenly feels like the most important objective around.
It seems insane to say, but while so much of Mewgenics is about what happens on the field of battle, there is a whole half of gameplay not even touched on, involving the life-sim nature of looking after these cats. While they may have undergone a lot while adventuring, these cats don’t get an easy retirement back at the player base.
Instead, it’s a constant struggle to manage resources to keep them all happy and frankly alive. Part of the genius of Mewgenics is that although a successful team can’t go back out on another adventure and are retired, they can still have a huge influence on gameplay and future runs. Going from combat, their role suddenly thrives instead on being breeders, passing on their best abilities and mutations to the many kittens that will be born thanks to the seemingly endless supplies of strays arriving at the door.
What Mewgenics taps into, then, is this whole other gameplay loop, which is about ensuring the best cats breed to make the best team, ending up with potentially run-busting combinations of stats and abilities. There are hard decisions to make as well. Several very unusual vendors show up early in the adventure, each one offering everything from more furniture, to increasing the comfort of the player’s house and thus attracting better cats, to offering items for sale that help in combat encounters. In order to upgrade these vendors, though, of course, they want donations of cats…which means there is an intriguing balance between sacrificing potentially good breeding cats to unlock more overall progress against succeeding in general encounters with the best team.
As so many other developers over the years since The Binding of Isaac cherry-picked the best bits of the game and iterated on them further, Mewgenics has taken some of the best learnings in the turn-based tactical genre and packaged them together in such a smart way. That inspiration stretches across bits of everything from Into the Breach and Slay the Spire, all the way to XCOM and back again.
