Video Games: How I learned to stop worrying and to love herding cats

By Edward Brydalski
(Image above: Mewgenics official poster, courtesy Edmund McMillan)

Mewgenics is a masterwork of interconnected game design that rewards player choice and experimentation, while still remaining accessible to casual gamers. 

Released on Feb. 10, Mewgenics sold more than one million copies in its first week. It deserves many more sales.

Here’s the objective: Create a party of genetically compromised cats, equip them with whatever junk you find lying around, and send them off to fight the creepy little guys that inhabit a run-down world of alleys, sewers and just straight-up Hell.

If that hasn’t scared you off, then it’s time for your band of kitties to hit the streets.

Here’s how your first few runs will likely end: “Instructions unclear: Necromancer cat went mad, nuked map, and spawned 15 pissed leeches.”

But as you try again and again you will uncover the many layers of this mechanically deep, turn-based strategy *roguelike.

Mewgenics combines **tactical combat with a ***procedurally-generated character creation engine to create a game that’s easy to pick up and play, but demands hours of experimentation to fully understand.

Here’s a combat example: 

You have a party of four cats, a Ranger, Warrior, Wizard and Tank. You’re facing the first-stage boss: Radical Rat (A developer-admitted parody of Mouser from Super Mario 2). The Rat throws a Bomberman-style cross-pattern bomb that puts your Ranger, Warrior,and the Rat himself in danger of lethal damage. Your Wizard and Tank were downed with 0 HP. Your Ranger walked into its own bear trap a turn earlier and is immobile. However, the Rat and the bomb are in range of his lobbed attack. It’s not powerful enough to kill the Rat, but could deactivate the bomb. Your Warrior can also reach the bomb, but oh no! A random event gave it a mutation that makes its attacks deal fire damage! If it hits the bomb, it will explode.

And after an hour-long run filled with quiet decision-making and potentiality and circumstance, you’re faced with a single pivotal choice: Do you move the Warrior out of harm’s way, use the Ranger to deactivate the bomb and attempt to survive whatever the Rat does next – or – do you intentionally detonate the bomb with the Rat, Warrior and Ranger in the path, risking permanent stat debuffs, to end things here and now?

“OK,” you say. “The combat is fun, but where is the variety in using the same moves over and over?”

Thankfully, you don’t. Cats spawn with a wide array of active and passive abilities, with more coming alongside level ups. Want to make a Wizard with elemental focuses in fire and ice to freeze and thaw enemies at will? You can do it! What about a ranger that stands in one spot and increases his range and damage every turn. You got it! Maybe a necromancer that repeatedly downs itself and returns from the dead by way of corpse-jacking the bodies of fallen foes? If you really, really want to, sure.

“Ok, OK,” you say. “The combat is fun and the abilities make runs feel totally different, but what’s a *roguelike without loot?” 

Mewgenics has a copious number of items you can pick up along the way. Weapons, consumables, armor, headgear, accessories and trinkets all provide unique benefits and use cases for different styles of play. The fun really comes in once you start mixing items and abilities to break the game.

“OK, OK, OK,” you say. “The combat is fun, the abilities make runs feel totally different, and the items allow for wacky interactions… but what about the cats? Where do they come from?”

Well, much like real life, your feline companions are fickle. After completing a run, they are “retired,” relegated to lazing about your home base, getting in fights, and most importantly – breeding.

As nights pass at home base, your collection of kitties may pair up, with quality time resulting in the next generation of Rogues and Clerics. Those kittens will inherit certain traits of their parents. One might have mama’s extra high base strength stat or daddy’s genetic mutation that makes its tail look like a flower that inflicts fire damage for some reason. (Probably another  Super Mario reference…) But beware! Just like real life, inbreeding is possible, and not optimal. After enough generations of kissin’ cousins, their spawn will enter the world with purely negative genetic mutations. Thankfully, you can send them down a sewer pipe to your strange neighbor so they don’t clog the gene pool. Don’t you love it when games have good morals?

Just like the roguelike nature of Mewgenics’ combat, its kitty creation system rewards player agency. Experimentation begets understanding, resulting in a harder, better, faster and stronger puss-puss.

The iterative process of playing Mewgenics shares a lot with its creation. Co-developer Edmund McMillen is the type of guy who will spend the better part of a decade on a single project. His last major game, The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, went through four major revisions over seven years. Isaac is also a game that takes a simple core and stretches it to an absurd and glorious conclusion. McMillen’s process is a labor of pedantic iteration and revision leading towards a supremely immersive game state:

Everything affects everything else

• Mewgenics is available exclusively on PC through Steam for $29.99.
• Console ports are planned to be released next year.

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Official animated trailer:

Developer gameplay video: