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If you thought the six-year wait for Hollow Knight: Silksong was bad, think again. Mewgenics, a game from the creator of The Binding of Isaac that was first announced in 2012, finally has some new gameplay that we can dig into.
In a 50-minute-long video, developer Edmund McMillen walks us through the game. Mewgenics is basically Into the Breach, but with cat breeding instead of temporal shenanigans. You have a house full of cats, and each day you can take a group of them into a randomly generated map to engage in some combat encounters.
These are turn-based affairs that take place on an isometric tile grid, and you need to carefully consider where you move and place each of your feline units. You start out with four standard classes: mages, tanks, ranged attackers, and fighters. Each plays a little differently, and all cats have their own unique abilities and passives – that's where the so-called "mewgenics" comes into it.
After each battle, the game functions a bit like a deckbuilder, with each kitty leveling up and drawing from a pool of over 1,200 abilities it can learn. How you build each cat is very important, as it will determine what traits it passes on, allowing you to create an army of "Überkatze."
As you progress through the map, you'll encounter different events, and McMillen says there are hundreds – which ones you'll encounter depends on where you end up. These play like D&D skill checks, allowing you to put your cats' stats into use outside of combat.
Mewgenics is, unsurprisingly, visually a lot like Super Meat Boy and Binding of Isaac. It's all pretty gross, but in a kind of cute, endearing way. That makes it a little harrowing when you have to kill an enemy kitten or tomcat.
Enemy units all have different abilities, too. Kittens will run away after taking damage, and the Tom Toms deal their damage in large areas of effect. And, just like Into the Breach, you can damage your own units as well as use the environment to your advantage. It looks like a very tactical experience.
There's also permadeath to contend with, but this doesn't happen as soon as one of your units is downed, so don't worry about it too much. It takes several hits after a cat drops to finish them off for good, but there are some consequences, such as lowered stats or debuffs.
Once your cats come back from a run and you end the day at the stray house, they'll all eat, and maybe some will mate. It doesn't look like you can choose who breeds with whom, so you can end up with inbreeding, something McMillen says could be a problem.
While you wait for its February 10, 2026 release date, check out all the upcoming indie games you can get excited for.
