Mewgenics is a deeply violent game confronting an awful truth about cats

Anyone who meets Koga thinks she’s a kitten at first. But no, she’s at least six years old – maybe older. I have no idea, and the vets don’t either. She’s so small. My best guess is that Koga probably spent some time starving. Even now, many years later, meat has a certain way of making her seem possessed. Whatever actually happened, the truth is that I don’t like thinking about it. She’s the sweetest cat I’ve ever met, and the idea that she spent any time at all suffering – however brief it might have been – immediately makes me upset.

After playing Mewgenics, I started thinking about Koga’s time as a stray differently. Sure, she’s partially blind now. But she’s alive. Out in the real world, most stray cats only survive for a couple of years, if that.

When you first start playing Mewgenics, the brutality of the tactical game is a shock. When you finish a run, chances are high that your felines will lose at least one teammate – if they come back at all. Mewgenics is a roguelike, so this conceit around death shouldn’t be surprising. But I was taken aback by how the cats die.

Your cats don’t just tip over and disappear, as they might in most games. No, in Mewgenics, there’s no such thing as a normal death. Your cats explode into tiny chunks. Your cats are eaten whole by disgusting monstrosities. Your cats will become infested from the inside out with pests.

Even the moments leading up to death can be awful. Maybe your tabby loses a limb, or it spends an entire battle bleeding out. Perhaps your calico contracts a deadly disease and spreads it to your entire team, causing you to wipe out completely. There are even psychological effects, like a status that makes your cat lose its mind or flee in fear.

Like much of Edmund McMillen’s work, the shock factor is played for laughs. It’s a spectacle, almost: when your cat suffers a particularly harsh death, the game plays a gasping audience sound bite. But just like The Binding of Isaac or even Super Meat Boy before it, behind every childish joke and gross moment is a kernel of vulnerability.

Despite all the violence, Mewgenics is not a game that could have been made by someone who hates cats. A person who revels in the suffering of an animal would not spend countless hours coming up with thousands of possible designs and funny names for them. Someone who hates cats would not take care in recording thousands of voice lines that capture a vast spectrum of possible meows.

McMillen’s fondness for cats is evident in Mewgenics’ smaller moments, too. The way a cat will suddenly burst into an inexplicable chorus of meows. The fact that there are hundreds of possible moves and abilities, like butt scooching and throwing up hairballs, many of which are deeply cat-specific. Betrayals, like when a cat disobeys a command, all come with the same flicker of recognition: this is how a real cat would behave. How clever!

So if Edmund McMillen loves cats so much, why is the world of Mewgenics so deeply cruel to these creatures? I’ve spoken to multiple people who tell me that they don’t feel comfortable playing a game like this. These aren’t, like, animal rights activists or something. These are regular people who are unsettled by a fundamentally mean game. I get it. A major reason I’ve been able to stomach Mewgenics is because I’m a filthy save scummer who will redo portions of the game whenever something feels egregiously unfair. I do let cats die, but I’m also probably not experiencing McMillen’s intended severity of loss.

The game isn’t called Mewgenics because it expects you to treasure every cat equally. Breeding a powerful cat requires treating your stock like fodder, a means to an end. If you’re really intent on min-maxing, then you also have to get comfortable forcing your cats to inbreed, or throwing them into thunderdome rooms meant to cull out the weak. Why give a cat special treatment when it’s going to die one way or another? There’s always another stray who will come pawing at your door.

But no matter how viciously Mewgenics kills my favorite cats, I know that it doesn’t compare to the things cats in the real world have to endure. The average lifespan of an outdoor cat is only two to five years, or a fraction of what it would be for an indoor cat. It's certainly magnitudes shorter than the lifespan of your average Mewgenics cat. By some estimates, there are somewhere between 60 and 100 million feral cats in the United States alone. Statistics for feral or stray dogs are hard to estimate, but anecdotally, it’s much rarer to see a free-roaming dog in most major American cities. The discrepancy largely comes down to one unfortunate truth: society as a whole doesn’t care about stray cats.

I mean, can’t cats just handle themselves? Cats are apex predators, the thinking goes; they are designed to hunt and kill. And kill they do, as evidenced by the havoc stray cats inflict on bird populations. Felines are also infamously inscrutable: just ask any owner who has tried to determine where their own pet falls on the grimace scale. Like Mewgenics, a stray cat can suffer horrific trauma yet barely let on that anything is wrong. Cats have boundaries, and even the most beloved owner will be refused if those terms are ignored. I say this as someone who owns three cats: it’s much easier for the average person to care about dogs than cats. They’re called man’s best friend for a reason.

Popular wisdom might convince people that they don’t need to worry about neighborhood cats, but the reality is much starker. Content warning: the next paragraph contains graphic imagery.

For a while, I lived in a part of Brooklyn that acted like a highway for neighborhood cats on their way to their respective colonies. I’ve seen the barbarity firsthand. Cats walking around with shredded paws or oozing wounds. Cats with so many bodily fluids gunking things up, you can’t make out their faces. Cats dragging around organs. Cats limping their way out of a harsh storm. Screeching cats that would wake me up in the middle of the night as they fought one another for kibble. Cats only a few months old, bellies already swollen with kittens, impregnated by their own littermates. Cats who spent an entire lifetime inside with an owner, only to unceremoniously get dumped outside when that person moves to a no-pet apartment.

There’s a lot in Mewgenics that is fantastical and impossible. The game’s depiction of cats routinely being fed to the meat grinder is not one of them.

I wasn’t living in an unusually cat-laden hotbed. My neighborhood had a stray cat problem … in the way nearly every borough in NYC has a cat problem. The only difference between me and the average New Yorker was that I dared to look at the problem. This isn’t a heroic boast, because in truth there was only so much I could do for any given cat. And more often than not, caring was unbearable. I’d come to know all sorts of beautiful, friendly cats who would visit me daily for months. Inevitably, many of them would disappear without a trace. Every cat I met felt like a heartbreak waiting to happen. Losing cats in Mewgenics is tough, but at least you always know exactly what happened.

Maybe I’ve been desensitized. One of the side effects of dabbling with rescue and TNR cat groups is that algorithms have figured out that I am a softie. I’ve been cursed with the inability to scroll away when I come across an awful account about an internet stranger’s three-month-old kitten getting mauled by dogs. (Then again, just because Mewgenics didn’t shake me to my core doesn’t mean I was impervious to the woes of randomly losing a prize cat to some bullshit.)

I don’t know if Edmund McMillen, a man who readily admits he makes provocative games to ensure that people pay attention, intended the game to raise awareness about the experiences of real-world cats. What I do know, beyond the obvious love and care that went into a game that was in development for nearly a decade, is that McMillen could have gone further but chose not to. There’s also nothing in Mewgenics that allows the player to directly harm the cats. A game designer who just wants to push people’s buttons with dead cats wouldn’t exercise such restraint.

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There’s a segment near the start of Poets Square, a memoir by Courtney Gustafson that recounts how she came to be responsible for 30 feral cats, which captures the dilemma poignantly. Though some of her neighbors had lived there for years, all of them believed it was only a few cats who were roaming around the area – not dozens of them, as Gustafson discovered after moving into a new home.

There’s a difference, Gustafson argues, between the idea that no one wants an animal to suffer and that no one wants to witness an animal suffering. Before she was forced to face the problem literally standing at her door, Gustafson says, it was easier to convince herself she was a good person merely for being averse to animal suffering.

“Feral, for all the wildness it implies, just means that an animal was abandoned by the system that created it,” Gustafson writes.

At its worst, the violence at the heart of Mewgenics is a dispiriting sucker punch that doesn’t spare even the sturdiest of roguelike players. But in a world where people can’t bring themselves to acknowledge the daily tragedies unfolding in their own backyards, I’m glad that Mewgenics doesn’t allow players to look away from the suffering.