After 100 hours of The Binding of Isaac creator's new cat breeding roguelike Mewgenics, I'm not surprised it's the highest-rated game of 2026 so far

Mewgenics – the new cat breeding roguelike from the creator of The Binding of Isaac – is the first game in 2026 to score in the 90s on Metacritic and Opencritic.

After 13 years since its original announcement, Mewgenics has finally been released. And while the game went through a cancellation and reboot in that time, against all odds, it's both managed to live up to the expectations of the long wait and the expectations of following up one of the best roguelike games ever made in The Binding of Isaac – which was apparently just the devs testing out roguelikes before making Mewgenics.

In GamesRadar+'s Mewgenics review for, managing editor Ali Jones gives the game a four-point-five out of five, and calls it "a dense, detailed, and hugely varied strategy roguelike."

"Mewgenics borrows much from its iconic predecessor with an imaginative and rewarding gameplay loop," Ali writes. "Occasionally harsh RNG can be a buzzkill, but doesn't prevent this from being a worthy successor to The Binding of Isaac".

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Other reviews have so far also been overwhelmingly positive, with the majority of scores from sites like IGN and GameSpot hovering around nine-out-of-ten, with a few 10s and eights sprinkled in the mix. This reception has made Mewgenics the first game to cross the threshold into the 90s for 2026, and it is currently sitting at 90 on both Metacritic and OpenCritic (although it was very briefly the second-highest rated game ever on the latter, behind Mario Odyssey).

I've also been playing Mewgenics since review codes went out, and I've put in 105 hours at the time of writing. I can tell you, it's well worth the hype it's getting, and it's a worthy follow-up to my most-played game of all time: The Binding of Isaac. Mewgenics will be hard to unseat as my 2026 Game of the Year – and even harder to unseat for the best soundtrack of 2026.

The Binding of Isaac creator's new roguelike Mewgenics already has over a third of the achievements of Isaac despite it being 11 years and 3 expansions ahead.