Mewgenics Is A Brilliantly Gross Antidote To Boring Roguelites

2 hours ago 1

The trick to most roguelites is your mastery of a particular deck or build. Whether it’s your cast of characters, deck of cards, or collection of spells, progress is gained as much from incremental additions as it is from your increased skill at playing that build. Chances are you’ve dedicated a huge amount of time to one specific build in Slay the Spire, or a preferred range of Jokers in Balatro, such that next time you head out you’re both better equipped and better acquainted to cope with the familiar path of enemies, challenges and incidents. Mewgenics, the latest game from Edmund McMillen and Tyler Glaiel, responds to this format by saying, “What if we screwed that all up and threw it in the trash?” Oh, and added, “And threw in as much toilet humor as we possibly can?” The result, I’m delighted to report, is really rather impressive.

Mewgenics (out February 10 on Steam) is a Slay the Spire-style roguelite but with turn-based RPG-like battles played out on a small grid. For each run you take a group of four kitty-cats, each with their own roll of skill numbers, who are then assigned a class before the run begins. You then make your way through an ever-longer series of maps, each with battles, mystery situations, random treasures and boss fights, using your crew of cats and their somewhat randomly assigned sets of abilities, until you’ve figured out how to combine them as an incredibly effective team. Win the fights, defeat the most distant boss, and you’ll return to your home to, oh no, have all four of them (if they lived) retire. They’ll never fight again. All those skills you learned, the ways you figured out how to allow them to buff one another, a particular one-two combo you found to be especially effective? That’s gone now. Time to start over.

That sounds rough, but the point is, you managed all those things, gained all that ability, on that single run. You can do it again, with four different cats with different skills, and perhaps different classes (you assign cats with specific class-granting collars before you begin, picking from, say, Mage, Thief, Fighter and Hunter, with more collars becoming available the more you play), and find a whole new way for a new crew to come together. Once. Of course, at the same time that you’re still gaining all the knowledge, you’re still getting better at the game, just not perhaps in the way that’s quite so familiar.

You get more cats, by the way, through the magic of nature. After picking two cats from a mad scientist, leaving them alone together overnight can cause—well look, when a mummy cat and daddy cat love each other very much, they fuck and make a baby. And your retired vets (they hate that term) will breed, passing on their genetics to a new generation of battle-cats. So long as you have enough food to feed all the feline inhabitants of your home, you can keep on breeding as many as you wish, then pick four to take with you on your next adventure.

Cats that are no longer useful to you are, um, given away. Via sewer pipes, to a range of unsavory types who want the cats for…look, it’s best not to ask questions. But give each of these unsavory types enough and they’ll bestow you with useful advantages: a bigger home, more food storage,

And so it goes on. Play more, reach further, unlock more, play more, reach further, unlock more, in that idyllic cycle that marks the best of this genre. I have no doubt that Mewgenics is going to prove a massive hit, given it delivers in all those incredibly hooky ways while having a fresh approach with its constant new teams. This is made even more impressive by the sheer amount of variety on each run, with different mini-bosses appearing, new enemy types showing up, unique events, completely new sets of spells and skills getting assigned, and indeed brand new songs being performed in the midst of your encounters. Oh yes, it’s kinda a musical too.

However, I do take issue with some of the design. It’s possible to get phenomenally unlucky in ways that seem to undermine the ethos of the game. Random events like the Sandstorm are absolutely ruinous to a run, where every battle sees swirling sand deliver one damage to every character in the battle every round. That sounds innocuous enough, until you’re in a position where your kitties are very low on health, and reviving any who have been knocked out likely only brings them up to one health. That’s an infuriating cycle to be stuck in, and it’s a persistent effect that ruins your whole run. Not least because replacement cats tend to be pretty much useless, at which point it all stops being fun.

Combine a situation like that with a mini-boss that has a 50-percent chance of avoiding hits and a run of bad luck with that, and it feels so hopeless you want to give up. But this means wiping out your whole team, losing all the coins, food and artifacts they’ve gathered, and means having to breed more cats to set out again. When all of this happened to me, I was also low on food, and then for some godforsaken reason I had three nights in a row when the cats refused to breed. So, um, it’s time to head off with the four random strays and hope. You can’t actually lose, because at a certain point it just forces you to have four cats and the opportunity to go on a run, but eurgh.

I encountered so much bad luck that I began to get too frustrated. There’s an attack that’s supposed to hit 30 percent of the time. I’ve seen it hit once out of maybe 590 billion uses. In my direst straits I ended up with a strain of genetics in my kitties that saw them born as “pacifists” and thus unable to kill enemies—that’s a problem. Coincidences, terrible strings of coin-flips, and enemies deciding to take seven turns in a row start racking up to the point where I was just the helpless victim of the game’s RNG, in a game where the odds are already deliberately stacked against you. I started resenting Mewgenics instead of enjoying it.

Like I say, this isn’t a condemnation of the game—it’s very obviously an extremely good one, and it delivers on its goals in vast bucketfuls. It’s wonderfully drawn, incredibly silly, and amazingly inventive. And it has so many completely fabulous songs. And look at the top: this isn’t a review! It’s up to someone willing to dedicate the hundred or more hours this game seems to need to write that. Me, I just got a bit fed up of its brutality after a bit, and while I’m still afflicted by a desire for “just one more go,” I’m also a bit cross with it too.

I’m so interested to see how its toilet humor lands. It’s so childish in all the best ways, with incessant poop and pee gags, splendidly unpleasant depictions of cats rutting, giving birth, and eating one another, and even songs to go with such moments (I don’t know if it’s called “Cannibal Kitty” but that’s my favorite). It also has scenarios in which your cats can choose to eat human fetuses, spiders that crawl inside enemies and eat them from the inside out, all sorts of delightfully gross-out stuff. Although, I should add, this is far more tempered than in previous McMillen games: it’s practically a work of maturity compared to The Binding of Isaac‘s sensibilities. Tyler Glaiel (The End Is Nigh, Bombernauts) must be a good influence on him. I’m fascinated to learn how the traditional audience for a game like Monster Train, Darkest Dungeon, Dicey Dungeons, Into the Breach, and so on will react to the crassness.

I also think I would have a lot more time for Mewgenics if it were on Android and iOS. This feels like the perfect game to play on my Pixel tablet, where I’d far more comfortably while away time with a run here and a run there, rather than sitting at my PC. (Obviously the Steam Deck is an option, but not the same.) It seems a mighty odd choice to limit this to PC on release.

Mewgenics reveals a colossal amount of work that has gone into making it so incredibly variable, and it’s very rewarding with all the decorative extras that surround the core loop. Its humor will definitely be a miss for many, but I suspect its depth and difficulty will give many cause to rise above it and play anyway. I just need some time to calm down before I go back.

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