Review: Mewgenics Is a Strategic Roguelike Gem

The original Mewgenics teaser trailer, which featured that whole catchy theme song about rubbing cats on cats came out 13 years ago in August 2013. 13 years! Frankly, I wondered if it’d be vaporware after that time spent in development hell, even though Edmund McMillen confirmed in 2020 that wheels were in motion. It took time, but Mewgenics is here now and it’s a strategic roguelike gem that I love more than The Binding of Isaac. The final game is so satisfying, and I genuinely think the development team isn’t exaggerating when they say its campaign could last over 200 hours.

Mewgenics’ concept is rather simple. You take cats and send them off on grand journeys to different areas where they’ll face all sorts of foes, grow as individuals, and bring back food, equipment, and cash. When they return home, you take the survivors and bring them inside to breed new cats, hopefully passing on helpful mutations and abilities. Or, maybe you send them off to terrible people to do things like upgrade shop stocks, gain bigger houses or storage spaces, or gain access to other perks. As you get stronger generations via encouraging breeding with certain characters, you advance through acts that offer more challenges and fresh horrors. 

Like The Binding of Isaac, Mewgenics features a similar sort of tone, and the sense of humor also feels like what you’d expect from past McMillen games. It can get dark! It’ll border on (or go past) what you might consider offensive. (For example, an abused child is one of the shopkeepers you’ll meet not long after the first act begins.) Enemies will be grotesque, and we’ll see foes that are things like fetuses. I feel like if you’re familiar with the developer’s work, you sort of know what to expect. I will say that sometimes it did surprise me in positive ways, such as when I got my first nonbinary cat CoryBob. (They’ll feature a question mark instead of the traditional gender marker.) For the sake of accessibility, there is an option to turn off explicit kitten-making, in case that makes you uncomfortable. But know going in that this title goes places. 

While the humor will be hit or miss from person to person, I feel like everyone will appreciate and adore the Mewgenics gameplay loop. You start at your home. Each cat can go on a run once, and you can send out a group of four at a time. (Note that while in the midst of an adventure that number could go lower or even higher depending on if you pick up minor minions, strays, and certain abilities.) Once you select four cats you’ll send out, you choose which tags, which represent traditional types of RPG classes, they’ll wear. This will alter their starting stats, passive skill, and shift their default attack. 

Once you’re in a run, you’ll move along nodes on a map in a neighborhood, with an option to shift to a harder path in each area for greater challenges and rewards. Each road involves opportunities to experience some random event that likely will be affected by one of your cat’s stats, a chance to get a piece of equipment or item, and shop ahead of enemy encounters, a mid-boss fight, and a boss. Once you hit the end of an area, you’ll get an option to return home and end the run or continue onward. However, if you wipe out, then you’ll only be able to either choose to save the food or money you collected on that journey up until your group’s demise.

When you enter an enemy or boss square, you’ll find your team on a square map grid facing off against the foes that make that region their home. Turn order will be represented in the upper right corner. Each of your allies can use a basic attack once (unless there’s a skill that allows you to do so more than once) and move once, and the amount of MP might allow you to also use a skill or two. There’s no undo, so make sure you’re certain when you take action. Each round involves everyone going once. Exhaustion sets in if you stretch things out, which negative affects cats’ performances. Classes like mages, rangers, and thieves will be your ranged units, with mages being your means of getting AOE attacks. Melee ones include ones like fighters and clerics, with the latter being the way you heal in fights without using restorative items. If your characters fall in a fight, the corpse will reflect how many additional hits it could take until it would be gone forever. As long as it doesn’t go below that number, it will revive and return for the next fight.

There are so many things about combat that Mewgenics gets right and makes the roguelike strategy game feel satisfying. For example, a ranger character can get active abilities that summon things like Tom Toms or deploy charm traps, and a passive could provide boosts to those summons. A cleric’s passive could provide improved healing when you heal an ally or add a regen effect that also affects allies. A mage could see specific elemental boosts, encouraging you to focus on acquiring spells for that type. These can encourage you to prioritize certain skill acquisitions or actions as you play, perhaps allowing you to go further with a party because of the moveset bonuses.

The boss fights in Mewgenics are often awesome as well, and the fact that you can sometimes plan for the mid-bosses or final boss in an area due to knowing who might be the opponents is helpful. One boss in the initial act one alleyways area involves a rat tossing bombs. As long as you take out those bombs before they all explode, you can face the fight barely taking any damage, but that means making sure you’re mobile and have foes with ranged attacks. One sewer major opponent involves a slime that divides up into smaller and smaller slimes as you beat its forms, so makes with AOE attacks or rangers that laid traps can be handy. The downside is once you get into the second act, there can be some really challenging foes, and some of the later bosses could wipe a whole unprepared party. By that point you’ll hopefully have stockpiled and a wide range of cats waiting at home so you can rebuild, but it can really test you.

However, there are also a few things that keep Mewgenics from feeling perfect. The in-battle map is one. There are many situations where it can be difficult to see where enemies, items you can pick up, or hazards may be due to positions of other stage elements. Since we can’t rotate or jump to an overhead perspective, it becomes impossible to see. I hate it. Field of vision is also an issue, with some characters like mages being unable to see two spaces in front of them if a fallen corpse is in between them and their new target. Which feels problematic when that opponent is downed or perhaps even quite tiny. Likewise, size can make managing cats in the field or at home a bit troublesome.

Once you decide to end a run either by choice or falling in a fight, you return home and can make fresh decisions based on the spoils of war. You can choose which newly acquired equipment you can keep for future runs. Items will get worn after use, so it isn’t like you can keep some things forever. Food will be added to reserves, determining how many days you can go without heading out on a run again. (Each cat needs one food per day.) The stores will restock, giving you a chance to buy things like more food, tags, and furniture to make your home more comfortable and conducive to cat-breeding. Most importantly, you can choose to donate cats and kittens you don’t want or need to the various people around town in the name of larger homes, more storage, more shop stock, and other bonuses that will help you make more progress or perform better, with each of those NPCs having certain types of animals they want. And, once you make your preparations and have a fresh party of four who would be ready for a new run, you head back out again.

And, well, you’ll be doing that a lot. Mewgenics ended up being a massive game. There are a lot of classes to eventually unlock. There are more enemy types than I expected, each with optimal ways of managing them. Stage hazards appear, and accounting for certain types of terrain and effects can aid in survival. Loads of equipment comes up, as well as quest items that it’s also quite possible to lose if a run fails. (I hate when that happens.) Plenty of different events can come up at question mark squares. You can find a lot of different pieces of furniture to adjust the stats of your home to make it more conducive to cat breeding or certain behaviors. There’s always a good reason to go on another run. Especially since you need to diversify to pick up more beneficial mutations and discourage inbreeding so you don’t pick up negative traits for a family line.

In the time I’ve spent playing Mewgenics, it’s consumed my free time. I’ll think about which cats I want to breed and what kinds of party combinations I’d like to try. I consider how I’ll approach new minibosses and bosses I’ve encountered. I’ll think about how to deal with certain events or which unlocks I should prioritize. It’s the sort of strategic roguelike that encourages fresh approaches and experimentation, and the wealth of opportunities means every run can feel like a new story.

Mewgenics will appear on PCs on February 10, 2026.