"We have made back our development budget after 3 hours": Over 8 years in the making, strategy roguelike Mewgenics is an instant hit for The Binding of Isaac creator and his team

Mewgenics, the peculiar new tactical roguelike from the mind behind The Binding of Isaac, launched today alongside overwhelmingly positive reviews from players and critics, and now we officially know it's shaping up to be a big commercial success as well.

Coming from The Binding of Isaac maker Edmund McMillen and his longtime collaborator Tyler Glaiel - a team that also brought us The End is Nigh - Mewgenics is about as much of a departure for the co-creators as it gets. It's still very much a roguelike, but here you're tasked with building a superpowered, mutant cat army and sending it into turn-based battles where you'll need to get all strategical.

Glaiel shared an update on Bluesky celebrating an extremely fast recoup on the team's investment. "And we have made back our development budget after 3 hours. Thank you all," he said.

Apparently, this cat-'em-up is a winning formula by pretty much every metric. At the time of writing, the game is blowing up the Steam charts and has almost 800 reviews on the platform, 96% of which are positive.

It's also a hit with critics, with our own Ali Jones giving it 4.5 out of 5 stars in his Mewgenics review, and calling it "a dense, detailed, and hugely varied strategy roguelike" with "an imaginative and rewarding gameplay loop" that's only slightly hampered by sometimes brutal RNG.

and we have made back our development budget after 3 hours. Thank you all :)

— @tylerglaiel.com (@tylerglaiel.com.bsky.social) 2026-02-10T18:57:47.670Z

Let me quickly remind you that Mewgenics was first announced way back in 2012, but later canned in 2016 and rebooted in 2018. That means, at the very least, it's been in active, continuous development for eight years, making that three-hour turnaround all the more impressive. There's no telling what heights the game will reach in the coming days and weeks, but things are off to an extremely encouraging start for Mewgenics. It has cats; I should've known.

After 20 hours spent training necromancer cats and raising an army of sentient rocks, I can safely say Mewgenics is one of the best roguelikes I've ever played