Mewgenics review: "The Binding of Isaac collides with Into the Breach in a strategy roguelike that has me battling bomber rats, breeding brutes, and more"

The Ranger quickly became my favorite class in Mewgenics. At face value little more than a standard archer archetype, it quickly becomes indicative of the diversity that underpins this long-awaited roguelike strategy game. A Ranger can be an assassin, dialling up their ranged damage and crit chance to delete enemies from afar. They can be a machine-gunner, firing multiple times in a single turn to thin out enemy numbers. They can be a sentry, taking shots at anything that moves within range to whittle down HP. They can spawn crowd-controlling traps around the arena, or summon multiple familiars to slow down enemy advances.

My fondness for the Ranger, however, has also proven to be my downfall. In this particular run, I've paired them up with a Cleric, whose kit normally revolves around healing, but this time is focused around designating an 'Alpha', and then bestowing powerful buffs on this new leader. On one turn, during a climactic boss fight, I've saved up enough mana to pump my Ranger so full of upgrades that it removes half this boss's HP in a single turn. Unfortunately for me, I've forgotten that this particular boss possesses its killer when it's downed, which means that now I'm facing off against possibly the most powerful character I've ever created. Even with the odds three-to-one against, my Alpha Ranger wipes out their entire team, and I lose the run.

Mewgenics is a roguelike strategy game styled after the narrow combat arenas of turn-based games like Into the Breach. But instead of city-spanning kaiju fights, these battles are somewhat more domestic, initially taking place on the litter-strewn asphalt of a dingy alleyway against rats, mice, bugs, and various stray cats. The fights remain fair because your fighters are also little more than stray cats, which is where Mewgenics starts to veer dramatically away from polite convention and into its creator's unique take on the world.

Cat Fight

The long-time brainchild of The Binding of Isaac creator Edmund McMillen, Mewgenics borrows much from its predecessor. Its own roguelike structure may be entirely new, but a toilet-humor aesthetic and multiple Isaac-themed easter eggs are baked in alongside a combat philosophy shaped by replayability; eventually, you'll grow familiar enough with the foes you encounter to plan around their behavior, but the first few meetings will likely be shaped by confusion as you try to work out how they're trying to hurt you.

Your cats will mostly see you safely through each battle, but Mewgenics commits to the roguelike formula by rarely letting you use the same characters twice. Once a unit returns safely home, it's 'retired', and can't be sent out on a new expedition. Similarly, there's a good chance that its gear is worn out, no longer fit to be taken out by a new cat. It's a formula that keeps you rotating through cats, classes, and items regularly, committing to genre conventions by forcing you to build mostly from scratch with each new outing. Initially, it's abrasive, asking you to answer a lot of different questions about your approach before you're in possession of anything like all the facts.

But over time, it begins to settle into an effective loop. Your cats head out, and hopefully return safely home with vastly improved stats and fresh gear. Then, those feline heirlooms are passed down to the next generation, and your retired kitties are given a home in which they'll help create the generations that come after that. Each night, there's a chance that cats will breed, passing on their vital statistics and sometimes their abilities to their offspring. A retired cat in a comfortable, well-furnished home will breed more regularly and give birth to kittens in better condition, which will grant you the edge when they're ready to go out on their own adventures.

Breeding is not a transparent venture. I spent multiple days unsuccessfully trying to interbreed my retired Tank class cats in order to create a host of roided-up kittens, but I'm still not sure why those cats weren't interested in each other. On another occasion, it took several days to discover that the powerful Fighter I was trying to breed kept spurning advances night after night because he was more interested in his male housemates than the female ones. And even when cats do breed, there's little guarantee that they do so with the mate you've chosen for them, or that the resulting kitten will have inherited the stats you were aiming for. More than a pedigree breeding program, Mewgenics opts for a rising tide approach, where gradually, the improving condition of your breeding stock will contribute to a slow, steady, upwards cycle that benefits the entire population.

Facing cat-astrophe

But it doesn't take much to slip several rungs down the evolutionary ladder. 'Fair' is not an adjective that contributes heavily to McMillen's design philosophy, and Mewgenics is no exception to that. Regularly outnumbered and out-gunned, especially in unfamiliar boss fights, it's a game where you mostly remain the master of your cats' fates, but in which a single roll of the dice can set off a cascading effect where eventual victory is impossible. You can jettison from a run after the battles at the end of each area if you know you won't be able to get through the next one, but if you die before then, your cats, their genes, and all their gear will be lost forever.

Maintaining that constant level of risk is important, but there are times where I've cursed certain aspects of Mewgenics. Random events are unavoidable, and while some are blessings, others are significant banes. One such encounter has the apparently minor effect of making a cat smell bad - a limited inconvenience, you might imagine, but allied cats are forced to use up their movement action getting away from their stinking ally, often costing you an entire opening round and giving your opponents a free shot. An unfortunate roll of the dice is one thing, but the lack of ability to deploy your cats where you want them can mean that an entire run is ended by bad luck, and multiple runs that come after that suffer too.

Still, Mewgenics marries its more chaotic elements with the detail required by this kind of strategy roguelike almost perfectly. Wildly varied build paths nestle up against tight strategy gameplay in a way that brings real skill expression alongside deliberate, tactical planning. Innumerable combinations of skills, perks, and items ensure that you're constantly rotating through new ideas and new strategies, even against familiar foes. The lack of guard rails that enables Mewgenics to sometimes feel unfair is also what can make it so delightful when you have a run where you cats break it apart themselves – and being tasked with dealing with a barrage of randomness avoids the build chasing that can whittle down the likes of Hades 2 into becoming predictable.

The gross-out humor and whacky build interactions that have been a key part of McMillen's work for decades don't distract from detailed, finely-crafted combat encounters. And for those looking for the replayability, optional challenge, and cryptic puzzles that shaped The Binding of Isaac and its endgame, Mewgenics is an enormous game - almost 50 hours tells me I've barely scratched the surface of what this game offers, and the direction my progression has gone in differs substantially from what other early players have told me they've uncovered.

For a game 15 years in the making, which has changed almost beyond recognition since its original inception and sits in the shadow of an enduring indie juggernaut, Mewgenics might easily have faded into obscurity. Instead, it's an excellent addition to its creator's already enviable canon, and a notable new pillar in the roguelike pantheon he helped to establish.

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