Mewgenics review: Balancing chaos with player freedom

Mewgenics is an experiment. You will fail, weird stuff will happen, and everything will be fine. That’s expected from a game made by The Binding of Isaac’s creator, Edmund McMillen, and his friend Tyler Glaiel, who worked with Edmund on The End is Nigh.

Mewgenics is half tactical RPG, half resource management, where cats are your resources. Cats have their own stats and go on adventures in a party of four. Like regular RPG characters, cats get buffs, debuffs, and afflictions, use melee and ranged attacks, offensive, defensive, and utility skills, and equip items and consumables to improve their stats and give them extra resources.

It’s a tactical RPG where your character is not a buff Viking or a demon witch but a weird and occasionally deformed cat. They equip collars that give them a specific class and role, like Tank, Necromancer, and Ranger, which you can set before each adventure. It all happens in a roguelike skin, where you play the game in runs that partially affect the next.

The house where your cats breed. Screenshot by Destructoid. Between runs, you manage a house where your cats can breed and give you new characters for future adventures. Once a cat ends an adventure, it can only breed, and it no longer joins parties. Much like when Pokémon breed, cats may transfer stats to their offspring, though you can only influence, not control, which stat will be passed over, when the cats will breed, or with whom they breed.

It’s not your traditional tactical game either, as it leans on the RPG aspects heavily. Don’t play Mewgenics expecting a rock-paper-scissors mechanic like Fire Emblem and Japanese TRPGs. The game is more about making the right build and optimizing your character than about being smart with character placement and movement. It’s far more complex.

The split between a tactical RPG stage and a character management stage resembles the flow of Cult of the Lamb and Dave the Diver, where one part of the game feeds the other and leads to incremental progress.

The combat grid in Mewgenics. Screenshot by Destructoid The limited control you see in breeding is a recurring theme in other parts of Mewgenics. The game is chaotic, and chaos always presents itself first to allow you to act second. It can manifest as a bunch of rubber tire obstacles on the map that bounce around and damage characters, including yours, or it may be a consumable that gives you all stats up but random status afflictions.

While chaos often comes by way of enemy attacks or skills, it’s also often a “yes” or “no” choice rather than chance alone. You’ll place traps that send spikes at random characters – including yours – when attacked, or use an arrow shower skill that attacks random tiles in an area. It’s often up to you to choose whether you want to add more chaos to the run, but once you say “yes” to it, you'd better be prepared. I once used a consumable that fully healed my character's HP and mana, but made it use a bunch of actions so randomly that it ended up killing one of my other cats.

In the aftermath of Mewgenics’ randomness, the game asks you: What are you going to do with the consequences of this chaos? The game is not so much about controlling the odds as you would in Slay the Spire to draw better cards or in Clover Pit to get more sevens in the slot machine, as it is about playing with the hand you’re dealt.

However, you can only take advantage of chaos once you understand the game. That’s why Mewgenics feels frustrating before it feels fun: Chaos can take over as early as your first run, such as several events giving a cat 10+ status effects. Until you learn more about the abilities, what you can and can’t do, the items, breeding, etc., the game will be extremely brutal and occasionally frustrating.

That was overwhelming. Screenshot by Destructoid. New or casual gamers may easily feel overwhelmed with Mewgenics. It’s not a welcoming game for those unfamiliar with RPGs, tactics, or gaming in general – even though I’m sure your grandma can eventually understand and maybe even enjoy Mewgenics.

In my interview with Edmund, he told me this stay-at-home lady who wasn’t a gamer had logged hundreds of hours in Mewgenic’s beta builds, and I believe him. However, I still think the game can be a brutal experience before you reach that point of obsessing over it. You have to be really enjoying the game for what it is, not for how likely you are to control the odds, to get to that point.

Mewgenics gives you a lot more freedom to act on the chaos than other tactics games, which is what it does masterfully. You can use whatever skill and action on allies or enemies.

You customize your cats as you level up. Screenshot by Destructoid For example, one skill increases the cat’s Strength but makes them confused, which means they may attack themselves. You can use it on your enemies to make them likely to hit themselves or on allies to increase their strength and deal more damage if the confusion roll fails. If you can petrify a character, you can do so on your enemies to skip their turn or to protect an ally from massive damage. If your cat is buffed whenever it receives an attack, you can attack it yourself with a low-strength cat just to buff it, instead of waiting for an enemy to target it.

The massive control you have over the consequences of the chaotic events is what makes Mewgenics fun to play. It creates a positive complexity, though it can still feel like too much sometimes

The major flaw in Mewgenics is when chaos becomes too much and makes the game happen to you, instead of letting you control the game. Some skills and consumables are completely random, so it’s nearly impossible to predict what will happen, though these are a minority. You can also get to the end of a run with an absurd number of debuffs from map events if you fail multiple rolls.

Mewgenics has around 1,000 items and countless character skills. My impression was that while I had a lot of options to choose from, such a massive diversity of things to do worked against the built-in player agency.

Items and traits affect gameplay a lot. Screenshot by Destructoid. When you have a library of resources this extensive, items have to be impactful. It's no fun if a run is ruined because your strategy would only work with one specific item that you have no idea if you'll find. So, some items and skills became too similar, so they can work across multiple builds. It feels as if any slightly reasonable skill and item pick works well enough for most situations, so it might not really matter which one you choose. The drafting part of the game, picking one thing over the other, feels less relevant.

However, this is my feeling based on the early runs in the game. I’m sure that as you unlock more and more content and harder runs, these choices matter more. But at least in the first 10 to 20 hours of gameplay, it feels like whatever you pick will have roughly the same impact, so there’s no wrong or right choice.

Mewgenics is more Darkest Dungeon than Into the Breach. Your cats can die permanently and take their equipped items with them. Every run in Mewgenics will brutalize your party, but the breeding stage will give you time to rebuild and get ready for another run.

Many aspects of Mewgenics are as brutal as Darkest Dungeon and more punishing than your traditional roguelike and tactical RPG. The game knows when you are save-scumming and punishes you for it, and there’s no “undo” button for actions. Whatever choice you make, it’s locked, and you have to face the consequences.

Save-scumming is a mechanic in Mewgenics. Screenshot by Destructoid. Overall, though, Mewgenics is an amazing game. It excels in player freedom, which is what I believe is the most important element in strategy games. Every fight is a problem with countless solutions, so you can get creative and have fun. However, the chaos may be a bit too much, and item diversity may feel like an artificial way to inflate the game mechanics.

You can be frustrated by the randomness and give up, or you can play along and try to figure it out like a puzzle. The game teaches you by doing random things you wouldn't expect, which can be fun or frustrating, depending on how you take it. It's a mindset thing. It's a good game in which complexity and randomness can be fun if you're able to roll with the punches. Player agency is the name of the game, and this is one of the most important features of a game, making it truly memorable.

The downsides are way less relevant than the upsides. Mewgenics is fun, complex, challenging, and chaotic, which are all elements a great (and fun) game must have.

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