Mewgenics

Mewgenics has been a long time coming. Edmund McMillen & co. started its development as early as 2012 after Super Meat Boy and ended up in a development hell after. But the irreverent cat-bio-engineering-roguelite is finally here.

You play as sort of a homeless cat shelter operator with a mad scientist friend, who helps you breed more and more effective battle cats. If it sounds weird, it only gets better (and worse) from here. The style, writing, and visuals are pure McMillen and if you've been hankering for more of that gritty and sometimes puerile 2010s humour from The Binding of Isaac, Mewgenics delivers in spades.

The game itself revolves around a roguelite structure with a JRPG flair, where your selection of cats embark on a quest to fight increasingly disturbing enemies with increasingly disturbing sets of skills. Each cat comes with a set of basic combat abilities which can be enhanced by giving them an RPG class such as Warrior or Cleric. The battles are tied together in a branching path with random encounters, narrative events, shopkeepers, and the like to choose from.

Once the battle begins, the team is taken into an alleyway, shop floor, or garden patch environment divided into tiles. The task is usually simple: kill everything that moves. The turn-based combat is almost exactly what you'd expect with cats moving and fighting in order of activation. The important and interesting bits come from various interactions with the environment, skills, and cats themselves. You can knock enemies into each other, set them on fire, block their movement, and exploit their various weaknesses while avoiding damage as best as you can. You're very much encouraged to try everything everything, as the game has multiple hidden elements that reward experimentation. Movement can be a bit annoying at times, as you can't pick precise tiles to move through, causing your kittens to take unnecessary damage.

Death is also not as simple as it might seem. Instead of being killed, a knocked-out feline is injured in some part of their body. Further damage may be fatal though, and in the case of a fighter of "good breeding", the loss of those mewgenetics can be a serious hit to your overall advancement. Runs end up in a boss fight with unique mechanics and most often a banging soundtrack. In the early game, these encounters can be beaten with raw stats alone, but latter ones really test your party synergies. Once a run is complete, some of the gear you might have picked up is stored and the now-veteran cats go into retirement. Each cat can partake in just one run but can be given away to local "eclectic" people who improve your shelter or grant other benefits.

The literal name of the game - aside from the pun of questionable taste - comes from breeding cats. This comes with cartoony but explicit animations, which can be turned off from the Settings menu. You can try to affect who makes out with whom, but the end-result is always a game of chance. If everything goes well, the kitten inherits their parents' best qualities and can therefore beat tougher opponents. This is one of the more innovative parts of the unusual game that elsewhere can feel a bit samey and traditional, even if the amount of content matches the affordable price tag well.