13 Years Later, Mewgenics Was Worth the Wait

Picture this: I’m forty-some hours deep, dragging a battered squad of cats through a cave that looks like the inside of a living thing, all veins and wet meat. We’ve just put down Guillotina — a hulking zombie house-boss who keeps breaking into my home — for the third time. And my reward for that hard-won victory? The one cat carrying my key quest item has to be laid on an altar and sacrificed. That cat had carried half my campaign. I did it anyway. That’s Mewgenics in a nutshell, and I’ve never played anything quite like it.

If you don’t know the pedigree here, a quick primer. Mewgenics is the long, long-awaited game from Edmund McMillen (The Binding of Isaac, Super Meat Boy) and Tyler Glaiel (Closure, The End Is Nigh) — two fixtures of the Flash-and-Newgrounds indie old guard. The concept’s been kicking around since roughly 2012, mutating through more than a decade of development before landing as this: a tactical roguelite about breeding a family of cats and sending them off to fight nightmares. McMillen handled the art and the twisted story beats; Glaiel did the programming. Somehow, against all odds, this ridiculous-sounding thing works far better than it has any right to.

The quick facts before we dig in

If you just want the essentials at a glance before the full breakdown, here’s where Mewgenics stands:

A game of two very different halves

The loop splits cleanly in two, and the tension between the halves is the whole magic trick.

The first half is the adventure — a procedurally generated tactics campaign that’ll feel familiar if you’ve played Slay the Spire or FTL. You pick up to four cats from your ever-growing household, slap collars on them (these are your classes: red for Fighter, green for Hunter, white for Cleric, and a good ten-plus more to unlock), and set out across a node-based map dotted with fights, shops, random events, and bosses. Combat is grid-based and turn-based, played out along a timeline of ally and enemy actions with clear ranges and movement. Here’s the thing McMillen and Glaiel nailed: it’s approachable without being shallow. You’re never drowning in impenetrable systems, but the stakes stay razor-sharp because a cat that runs out of health mid-fight can suffer permanent, limb-ruining injuries. Positioning matters. Synergy matters. And the environment is out to get everyone — puddles conduct electricity, grass freezes into damage spikes, desert heat blocks healing unless you’re packing water abilities. I’ve had entire fights flipped upside down by a random lightning strike.

The second half is home. Every run’s survivors come back changed, and then they retire — a cat that’s completed an adventure can’t be sent out again. So each new run demands a fresh squad, which means you’re constantly breeding the next generation, passing down stats and abilities to the kittens, adopting strays, and slowly building a monstrous family tree. Buy furniture for your hovel to nudge the odds of good inheritance. Send specific cats to the oddball neighbors — the merchant, the builder, the rest — to unlock more of everything. It’s meta-progression disguised as running the world’s most cursed cattery.

The chaos is the point

What genuinely sets Mewgenics apart from other tactics games is the sheer, gleeful freedom. Almost any ability can target allies or enemies. Got a skill that confuses a target but juices their attack? Cast it on an enemy to make them swing at themselves — or gamble it on your own tank for a massive hit if the confusion roll fails. Petrify a cat to shield it from an incoming blow, or lock down a dangerous foe. I kept stumbling into combinations I’ve never seen any other game in the genre allow.

And then there’s the look of it, which you cannot separate from the experience. This is McMillen through and through: cute cartoon cats juxtaposed with the macabre and the grotesque. As your cats mutate, get injured, and pick up parasites, they stop resembling cats and start looking like things that barely qualify — two heads, scorpion tails, human limbs, wings, tumors, worse. The stat boosts, though, are to die for. The humor is pure Isaac too: copious poop, gross-out gags, ability descriptions that just read “he go,” bosses that fake you out (one appeared as a harmless baby spider right before a giant one erupted). It’s so committed to being over-the-top that it loops back around to genuinely funny. Tying it all together is a stunning Ridiculon soundtrack — a 1960s-flavored mix of rockabilly, doo-wop, surf rock and swing that teases instrumental versions as you climb a chapter, then drops the vocals in exactly when a big battle peaks.

Who this is (and isn’t) for

I want to be straight with you, because Mewgenics is not a universal recommendation, and pretending otherwise would do you a disservice.

The learning curve is steep and the game is in no hurry to explain itself — it can take a good while before all the systems open up and the difficulty finds its teeth. The onboarding is weak, some crucial breeding information is buried where you’ll struggle to find it, and once your household swells past thirty-odd cats, just tracking them all becomes its own chaotic chore. The brutal RNG cuts both ways too: a chain reaction of status effects can nuke a two-hour run in seconds, which is exhilarating or infuriating depending on your temperament.

There’s a fair criticism worth airing, too: for all its mechanical brilliance, Mewgenics is thin on actual story. There’s flavor and weirdness in spades, but not much of a narrative to bind you to any particular cat or run. If you’re the type who wants emotional throughlines, you may find it’s a “wow, that’s weird and cool” game you dip in and out of rather than one you’re desperate to see the end of. And if you flatly hate randomness or long sessions, this will be misery, plain and simple.

Frequently asked questions

Is Mewgenics on Nintendo Switch or PS5?

Not at launch — it’s PC-only for now, available on Steam and verified for Steam Deck. McMillen has said console ports are planned once the PC version settles, with Switch and Switch 2 named as the most likely candidates. No firm date yet.

How long does Mewgenics take to beat?

The main campaign runs 200+ hours, and McMillen has said full completion can push toward 500. Reviewers were still uncovering new systems 80 to 100 hours in, so “beat” is a loose term here — there’s an enormous amount to see.

Do I need to have played The Binding of Isaac first?

Not at all. They share a creator and a certain grotesque sense of humor, but Mewgenics is a completely different genre — turn-based tactics rather than twin-stick action. Knowing Isaac just means the poop jokes won’t surprise you.

Is the humor and content really that gross?

Yes, and it’s worth knowing going in. Expect blood, dismemberment, mutations, plenty of excrement gags, and some crude sexual humor (the cat-humping animations can be toggled off in settings). If that’s a dealbreaker for you, it’s baked deep into the game’s DNA.

So, is it worth your money?

For the right player — the roguelite sicko, the min-maxer, the person who’d rather make a deranged idea work than optimize the same party for the hundredth time — Mewgenics is near-essential at $29.99. It’s messy, cruel, frequently hilarious, occasionally touching, and so deep that reviewers were still finding new mechanics 80 and 100 hours in. I’m dozens of hours deep myself and nowhere close to done.

Is it McMillen’s magnum opus? Maybe. It might genuinely be the next landmark indie hit — the kind of game people are still talking about years from now. What I can tell you for certain is that no game in recent memory has sunk its claws into me quite this deep, and I’ve lost more sleep to it than I’d like to admit. Just don’t get too attached to any one cat. They never last.