I can’t get Fish Sticks out of my head. Not the food, but the stray cat with a squished face and stubby legs that I wrangled into my shack in Edmund McMillen and Tyler Glaiel’s new roguelite strategy game, Mewgenics. The shop, the pub, the dentist; no matter where I go, I see his beady peepers deep in my subconscious. It’s the loss.
I sent Fish Sticks to the pits of hell to face the armies of Satan. Even though he had a nasty case of gastritis. Even though he slurped green goo that made his eyeballs bulge from his face. And he would’ve made it home, too, if it weren’t for a particularly pissed-off frog. The amphibian dragged him kicking and screaming into the path of the vacuuming jaws of a floating demon. The bastard gobbled him up. Him and his ability to pluck maggots from his allies’ rectums and swallow their souls. As he vanished into the demon’s belly, so too did my chances of passing his rectal soul-sucking powers to a new generation of adventuring cats.
All I’ve thought about for the last month is cats like Fish Sticks. Fat cats. Farting cats. Cats with cube heads. And cats with no head at all, but a giant beholder-style eyeball for a cranium. McMillen and Glaiel’s brand has long been stapling together obsessive gameplay loops with juvenile potty humour and more than a sprinkle of morbid horror. McMillen’s behind Super Meat Boy and The Binding of Isaac, and the pair made 2017’s The End Is Nigh – and I’ve liked them all. But Mewgenics, with its XCOM-like squads of mutant cats, has wormed its maggot-filled husk more deeply into my heart than any of them.
Mewgenics is a chaotic blend of so many genres. It’s a roguelite that strings together encounters into a multipart adventure, but it also has turn-based combat that plays like a streamlined version of Divinity: Original Sin, not to mention it’s also both a punishing dungeon crawler and a frighteningly deep hierarchical cat breeding simulator. Yet its systems coalesce into a cocktail that I can’t help sipping on until “10 more minutes” turns to “oh shit, I have to be up in four hours.”
As you’d expect from a game where you micromanage cat breeding, it’s weird from the off. You awaken on the examining table of local crackpot/genius, Doctor Beanies, who specialises in the most important pillar of modern science: felineology. Beanies has brought you here for a single purpose: collect the stray cat population of local town, Boon County, so he can conduct routine experiments, like time travel. The doctor tosses you the keys to a beat-up shack, your main base, and gives you two cats with which to cultivate a tribe.
But first, you’re in for a brief tutorial given by local cat-fight-club enthusiast, Butch. As you soak up his sage words, you’ll learn that Mewgenics is essentially DnD. Your cats embark on harrowing adventures, picking a route along Slay The Spire-style paths of battles, events, and loot. Your main goal, at least initially, is to get your cats across town and bag enough food from winning battles to feed the hungry kitties crashing at your shack.
When your two starter cats return from Butch’s guided tour, you’ll shift into the game’s other core loop: cat management. Cats retire after taking part in a single adventure, so you’ll need more of them to venture out again. How do you get more cats? By letting them bone. Switch off the lights to go to bed, and your founding felines will instantly get it on, producing a new cat that will become the first unit you send into the throngs of war.
The more you play, though, the deeper both gameplay loops become. Your first proper expedition introduces class collars, which let you assign roles to your cats that boost their stats, and you’ll quickly notice they’ve gained a random selection of traits and abilities, too. The short romp of the tutorial zone’s gone, transforming into a hellish gauntlet of Boon County’s alleyways, filled with bile-spitting fleas and a rat with sunglasses that throws exploding mouse bombs. But that’s just the appetiser. A few hours later, campaigns have transformed into three-stage adventures, offering a 90-minute DnD one-shot that, depending on what act you’re playing and which route you choose, could have you crawling through the depths of hell, squaring off against fire-spitting warlocks, or throwing hands with little green men on the surface of the moon. And the skirmishes you’ll have are equally unconventional.
Mewgenics’ combat is like a smaller-scale remix of the battles you’ll find in RPGs like Baldur’s Gate, Divinity or Wasteland. Like those games, its rigid rules are a foundation for creative freedom, while also being utterly ruthless. You and the enemy take turns, using your abilities to beat the ever-loving tar out of each other. But every ability, stage and enemy revolves around dynamic systems that you must obey. Some of these rules are obvious. If you’re standing in a puddle, using an electric spell is a bad call. But others caught me off guard by how intricately they overlapped. A personal favourite came when I thoughtlessly glued a superhero mask to my Cleric’s face, adding the ability to knock enemies into the air when he attacked. What I didn’t consider was that Clerics’ basic attacks also heal allies, so when I sent him to heal my Mage, he knocked her across the room. She landed right in front of a deranged cult member and, because she had an eternally dicky tummy, defecated on her new neighbour. The commotion riled up a robot nearby, which attacked the Mage, causing the defensive cross stapled to her head to launch magical heat-seeking missiles that turned everything in the vicinity to piles of flesh and metal.
These moments in combat, where rules butt against other rules, don’t always play out in your favour, but they make for wild and wonderful stories. It’s easy to concoct bizarre and powerful builds with innocuous abilities. Fish Stick’s maggot ability, Soul Link, is meant to connect units so they all take the same damage. After some tinkering, I realised I could use Soul Link to connect the maggots from his ally’s arse, and the battalion of very adorable squirrels my Druid could summon, to enemies, crushing the helpless critters to eviscerate foes. This realisation wasn’t a one-off event: As I have to bring new cats on every run, each adventure lets me concoct new bizarre builds.
Even if you wanted to rely on a solid build to carry you through multiple trips, you’d struggle, considering two trips are never the same. Mewgenics is quintessentially a roguelite, and that means every run is randomised. Enemy placements. Mini-bosses. Gear pick-ups. The abilities you pick between for your cats when they level up. Outside of main boss encounters, your adventure is beholden to the RNG gods. Mewgenics’ random events are particularly ruthless. One of your cats is selected to make a skill check on an event, such as opening a rubbish bin. Success might mean a rare item or a new passive ability, but failure can be brutal. I’ll always remember the fall of Bumbum, my Tank, who failed his skill check and had a parasite crawl into his ear and begin munching on his brain, gradually lowering all of his stats until he entered every fight as an unconscious, twitching pile of fur.
However, if you can avoid brain slugs, escape feline-hunting extraterrestrials and defeat the main boss of the run, all your surviving cats return to the shack, stashing their food and loot, then settling down for early retirement. Their days of venturing beyond the shack are done. Well, outside of special boss events that crop up throughout the story. With all that free time on their hands, they start getting very… frisky.
If you’re lucky, the cats in each litter will inherit the stats, traits and abilities from their adventuring parents. What could be a gimmick is an absurdly deep and complex management game I’ve now sunk hours into. By altering your shack’s stats with furniture you acquire from Boon County’s most sadistic prepubescent salesman, Baby Jack, you affect how much your cats want to jump each other’s bones, heal from injuries, or mutate into biohazard abominations only John Carpenter could love. I didn’t realise how deep down the rabbit hole I was until my flatmate asked why I was throwing adorable cats down a grimy sewer pipe. I explained that my retired veteran, Soup, had contracted Blood Frenzy, which makes her go on crazed, friendly-fire murder sprees, so now I was culling her entire bloodline before her descendants started humping it into the general cat population.
Regardless, all of this is just scratching the surface. I was shocked at how much there was to Mewgenics, and how frequently I was inundated with new mechanics to play around with. Its eclectic events, gear drops, cat abilities, hidden areas, bosses and main base upgrades mean, even after 100 hours, I’m still encountering new mechanics. But it all feeds into the fact that the game never settles for being more of the same. I never come back to my shack without a tall tale to tell.
It’s one of the first roguelites I’ve played where a bad roll of the dice leaves me excited, not deflated. Whether RNG blazes a path to success, or I’m handed Blasto, my chirpy Hunter cursed with a trait that gave him a zero movement stat, essentially paralysing him, I love the weird odyssey it sends me on. Whatever happens, I know I’ll come back with a corker of a story. And it’ll almost certainly involve poo.