Monthly Archives: February 2026
Time Deletion
Guys… I’m up to 77 hours in Mewgenics. It hasn’t even been two full weeks yet.
That’s not even the worst/best part: Slay the Spire 2 is hitting Early Access on March 5th. It has one of the best trailers I’ve ever seen for a roguelike deckbuilder:
Granted, I don’t really know of many other roguelike deckbuilding trailers.
In any case, yeah, pour one out for my gaming backlog. And frontlog, for that matter. I certainly haven’t been spending any time thinking about Expedition 33 (etc) in the last two weeks. Too busy drinking from the firehose. Perhaps I can circle back in April… no, let’s say May. End of Q2, for sure.
(Heh, I didn’t say of which year)
Impressions: Mewgenics
TL;DR: I bought Mewgenics on February 14th, and have 30 hours played after four days.
Mewgenics is a tactical roguelite and cat breeding sim from Edmund McMillen, of Binding of Isaac and Super Meat Boy fame. While it does not play like Binding of Isaac, it is absolutely the same kind of brand experience: crude humor, goofy visuals, banging soundtrack, absolutely broken skill/item combos, and a deeply compelling gameplay loop. Well… for the most part.
The game is divided in two parts: house and adventure. During the house parts, you are performing the “eugenics” part of the title. At the end of each game day, compatible cats will squirt out 1-2 kittens with some mix of the parents’ stats (and sometimes abilities/mutations), and the kittens themselves will grow into adults an additional day later. There is a lot of RNG involved in breeding into the best stats, but you can mix and match furniture to weigh the odds more in your favor. Or, honestly, you can mostly ignore it and just rely on the daily stray cats that wander onto your property.
When you are ready to adventure, you place up to four cats in a box, give them a class “collar,” and then equip them with any spare items you got from prior runs. After that, you progress through a linear series of nodes that includes battles, events, treasures, mid-bosses, shops, and final bosses.
Hobbes would accurately describe Mewgenic’s combat as “nasty, brutish, and short.” Fights take place in an intimately-sized, randomized board with you generally being way outnumbered. I would classify combat as Fair* with the asterisk emphasized. There is a turn-order ribbon, right-clicking will show you have far a unit can move and subsequently attack, and abilities work as described.
However, no punches are pulled, no mistakes unpunished. There is no move rewind if you didn’t move 1 square far enough, you can absolutely waste attacks by mis-clicking on the ground, and there is built-in punishment for save-scumming battles. Additionally, there are some mechanics that work differently than you may be used to in other games. For example, Tall Grass is terrain that gives the unit a 50% evasion chance… but this also applies to friendly heals and buffs sent your way. Having a Tank character with Thorns or other “on attack” debuffs are great… until an enemy uses a knockback ability and sends your cat bumping into said Tank, dealing massive friendly fire.
It’s also worth noting that if a cat hits zero HP, it goes into a downed state and gets a permanent reduction to one of its stats. If a downed cat takes much more damage though – or gets targeted by a corpse-destroying ability – it dies permanently. While you can occasionally get a mid-run replacement, that new cat won’t have a class and starts at level 1, so it’s barely a warm body.
The upshot to this harsh, rules-as-written gameplay is allowing for truly broken shenanigans. Some things are RNG-dependent, such as which items drop and what starting class abilities each cat gets. That said, each level up grants a cat a choice between four options, which can sometimes lead you into interesting directions. In one run, my Tank had a cheap, stackable bodyguard-like ability that automatically caused him to swap places with any other team member that got targeted with anything (attack, spell, etc). He also had a starting ability to give himself Thorns at the cost of not moving during his turn. Not much of a problem since he could protect the team from anywhere. He later got an ability to automatically Block any attack coming from the front. Considering the Bodyguard ability always places the Tank facing the attack… yeah, suddenly my whole team was effectively immune to the first 5-6 attack of every turn.
The balance to all this comes from the fact that cats who survive adventures are “retired” when they come back to the house. They can still stick around a breed and such, but you are going to need an entirely new set of four cats to go on further adventures. Plus, you know, RNG is RNG and you may never receive that same set of skills/items again. Plus plus, the game escalates in difficulty pretty wildly by the end of Act 1, let alone the start of Act 2 where I am. Let’s just say that broken combos can go both ways, if you aren’t careful.
Having said all that, Mewgenics also feels kinda bad sometimes. The house portion of the game feels good, but it keeps getting interrupted by the need to go adventuring, which can often take more than an hour depending on how deep you go. Adventuring by itself usually feels good, but there’s a conflicting desire to play sub-optimally to farm more resources for the house phase rather than do what’s best to ensure success of the run itself. Then there are the house progression unlocks, which are done by “donating” cats to NPCs. One of them wants retired cats, for example, so it’s sometimes tempting to just go on a bunch of first-zone-only runs and try and brute-force the rewards. If you don’t, you’ll be making due with cramped quarters for dozens and dozens of hours.
Also, right now Events in the adventure phase feel half-baked. Random cat is selected, given a small selection of Skill checks, and it’s not entirely clear whether the outcome was due to failing or even succeeding the roll (or what the odds even were). What’s worse, sometimes the best reward is tied to a particular Skill check, not just succeeding on any of them. For example, when given a choice between Eat/Loot/Examine, you might have three different positive outcomes possible, where “positive” might be “just flavor text” or “game-breaking item.” Binding of Isaac was filled with randomness too, sure, but it somehow feels worse in Mewgenics.
So, yeah, that’s the game. If Isaac is any indication (or the 1 million already copies sold), Mewgenics will receive years of support, hopefully addressing things like the Events (etc). Plus, it’s $30 MSRP.
The era of the indie is now.
Half-Cocked
So the news out there is that both Avowed and The Outer Worlds 2 flopped. Or, technically, “failed to meet expectations.”
Last year the developer released three games—a rare and impressive achievement for a studio of its size—but two of them failed to meet sales forecasts set by Obsidian’s parent company, Microsoft Corp. “They’re not disasters,” Urquhart says. “I’m not going to say this was a kick in the teeth. It was more like: ‘That sucks. What are we learning?’”
While Grounded 2 was a big hit, the disappointing results from the other two have led Obsidian to “think a lot about how much we put into the games, how much we spend on them, how long they take,” Urquhart says. Both Avowed and The Outer Worlds 2 were in development for more than six years, inflating their production costs and the company’s financial expectations. One of Urquhart’s missions is to cut down development timelines to three or four years per title. (source)
The piling on in the Reddit comments is understandable, and I agree with most of it. Neither Avowed nor The Outer Worlds 2 feel like games that have had 6+ years in development. The equipment upgrade system in Avowed is both punishing and boring, and two of the classes have nothing interesting going on in the Skills department. For TOW2, Skills/Perks were half-assed at best and irrelevant at worst. What in the world were the designers spending all their time on?
During the negotiations with Microsoft, Obsidian’s executives assembled a slideshow presentation for the concept that would become Avowed, pitched as an ambitious cross between megahits The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Destiny that would allow players to battle monsters together in a massive fantasy world. It was an impressive if unlikely proposition. “My thought when I first saw it was, ‘I don’t think there’s a team on the planet that could execute on this,’” says Josh Sawyer, Obsidian’s studio design director. Two years later, Obsidian stripped out the multiplayer feature, and a year after that it assigned a new director to the project. By the time Avowed came out, it had been in the works for nearly seven years.
Ah, well, there you go.
I’m not going to pretend to be an industry insider, or able to speak authoritatively on game design (or any topic, for that matter). But, respectively devs, what the fuck? We have heard for ages that development cycles are getting more expensive, and that is why game prices have to be $70, $80, and higher with macrotransactions. People just swallow the narrative that all the increases in technology and graphical fidelity make the process of making games cost more money. But peel back the layers and all of a sudden it certainly seems like the people in charge are just going off half-cocked.
Game design is an iterative process, yes. Inventing new forms of fun is hard. I can also understand that sometimes the fun only manifests itself once all the various interlocking systems are already in place. Again, though… what the fuck? “Skyrim meets Destiny in massive fantasy world” is not a game, it is barely a concept of a setting. Do these designers believe that the fun will simply manifest itself out of the aether? “If we build it, they will have fun”? Or do they assume that figuring out the fun is the easy part and can be added in later?
During recent breakfast meetings, Urquhart and his deputies discussed some things they could’ve done better with last year’s releases. Perhaps Avowed players needed the option to, say, commit crimes and get arrested to make the world feel more alive. Maybe The Outer Worlds 2 needed stronger virtual companions. It’s hard to imagine a game would sell more copies if it had pickpocketing, but Obsidian’s leaders say seemingly minor ingredients can make a big difference. “Our job, all of us here, is to go make games that people want to play and buy, and if we continue to do that, then we have a solid business,” Urquhart says.
“Minor ingredients,” oh my fucking god. They have no goddamn clue, do they?
Here you go, Obsidian, on the house. I’m not certain how pickpocketing would have worked in Avowed considering none of the NPCs move, but sure, it would be nice flavor. But I recommend starting with the fact that every part of the player progression experience is awful. You are punished for upgrading equipment since resources are finite and enemies don’t respawn, and are also punished for not upgrading equipment as enemies automatically deal 35% more damage if they exceed your tier. When you do upgrade though, you get a whole +4 to whatever stat, with nothing else interesting going on.
These sort of things are not “minor ingredients.” It’s the whole fucking game! You know, the thing that players do after purchasing your product? P-L-A-Y. Kudos to the people who designed the movement and vaulting inside the game world, but whoever came up with the fiddly bits needs some goddamn coaching. Would it have killed anyone to increase all the values by a few points when upgrading gear? Or playtested the Warrior/Ranger talents against all of the stuff the Wizard could do by default?
As for The Outer Worlds 2, same thing. Skills and Perks were deadass boring. How many of them meaningfully impacted combat at all? In what world should a player feel comfortable breezing through the entire last Act of game with 17 unallocated Skill Points and 5 Perk Points? Nothing I picked felt like it did anything other than add another percentage gain on otherwise extremely low base damage weapon. Hard to get excited about going from 490% increased damage to 520%.
It could be that I’m the one off-base. Maybe the entire problem with the games were one of marketing, or the story not being engaging enough, or the graphics being something-something. In one of the Reddit threads, someone commented how slowly people talked in Avowed being an issue. OK, sure. That said, it possibly couldn’t hurt to make character progression fun or exciting in any way whatsoever.
The hilarious and tragic thing are the lessons (un)learned.
Grounded 2 came together the quickest. Despite the popularity of the original, which the studio released during the pandemic gaming boom of 2020, Obsidian hadn’t planned on greenlighting a sequel until it got a pitch in early 2023 from Eidos Interactive, a studio in Montreal that was looking for outsourcing work. […]
Grounded 2 offers some lessons for a better way forward. Obsidian assigned a few senior staff to orchestrate the production in Montreal from 3,000 miles away, rather than develop the whole thing in-house. Chris Parker, an Obsidian co-founder who supervised development, says the distance was empowering because he could make hard calls more swiftly. One of the game’s vehicles—rideable insects called “buggies”—had originally been designed to be shared by multiple players until Parker and his crew realized the functionality wasn’t coming together, leading them to pivot. “I was like, ‘If this was one of our internal teams, we would work on this for another two or three months,’” Parker recalls. “We made this call because we could tell them what to do. It feels like we still run around with our kid gloves on internally.”
First of all… they hadn’t planned on greenlighting a Grounded sequel? I mean, yeah, not every game needs a sequel, people crave new experiences, sometimes devs want to move on, yadda yadda. Still, it feels bonkers to me that when a game company does strike gold on a fun game concept/design, it often just goes nowhere afterwards. Everyone sings Obsidian’s praises for Fallout: New Vegas, which cost $8 million and only two years to produce. How did that happen? It was basically a Fallout 3 mod. Which is probably why it was so fun in the first place, because it was built on an established foundation of fun.
We’ll have to see with Obsidian whether they take the lessons to heart. But I was also thinking about this other recent tidbit from Blizzard in a different article:
“[Warcraft is] a fantastic IP. In my humble opinion, it’s been underutilized and I just want to bring it to as many people as possible. And that means evolving what Warcraft means, what it is, and where it’s going. We want it to be approachable. Chris Metzen [executive creative director], is sometimes like, ‘I wish we hadn’t called it Warcraft. It sounds intimidating.’ But I’m like, nobody really thinks that about Warhammer. It’s an understood name.
“This idea of ‘third space’ in our online worlds, we can’t even define what that means exactly, but we’re working on figuring that out. We want people to come in, hang out and have birthdays, weddings, raids, grand adventures, play with their friends, meet new friends… all the things that World of Warcraft has been good at for over 20 years. (source)
The easy jokes are, you know, how Blizzard has a TCG, MOBA (abandoned), and Clash Royal-esque mobile app (dead) all within the same narrative universe. But remember, Blizzard had also been working on a fantasy survival game for many years before that got killed in development as well. Wonder what had happened there…
It was conceived to be similar to a more polished version of popular survival games such as Minecraft and Rust, containing “vast” maps supporting up to 100 players. Due to the ambitious map size, the game’s engine was switched from Unreal Engine, in which it was prototyped, to Synapse, an internally-developed engine created specifically for Odyssey and envisioned as something that would be shared by multiple projects. However, the switch led to significant problems – due to delays, Blizzard’s artists were forced to continue prototyping in Unreal, knowing their work would later be discarded. […]
At the time of the Microsoft acquisition, team members remained hopeful they would be allowed to switch back to Unreal Engine due to Microsoft’s stance on allowing game leads rather than executives choose the technology used. While the game was positively received by testers, however, there was estimated to be several years of development time remaining on the project, with even a 2026 release seeming overly optimistic. The news of the game’s cancellation was announced by Microsoft in a company-wide email in late January 2024.[2] Some of the former team members from Odyssey were moved to other projects in development,[2] though a significant portion were laid off.
Of fucking course. I especially liked the “allowing game leads rather than executives choose the technology used.” Seems like a good idea, maybe someone should try it occasionally.
You know, all this does is really highlight that nobody knows what they hell they are doing and it’s a miracle any fun games get built at all.
In An Age 
E33: How It’s Done
Feb 16
Posted by Azuriel
I am not particularly far in Claire Obscur: Expedition 33 (E33) – about 12 hours or so in – but I did want to briefly highlight one fantastic customization system that it has in comparison to, say, Avowed, The Outer Worlds 2, or frankly any game that professes to have player agency/customization at all. That system is of Pictos.
In many ways, Pictos feel like OG Final Fantasy 7 Materia: they are an item you equip that grants both stat bonuses plus a passive ability. Once you complete four combats with a given Pico equipped, the passive ability is permanently learned by everybody. Each character then has a pool of “Luma” they can use in a point-buy way to equip the passives. Some effects are cheap, like being able to gain +1 AP on a Perfect Dodge for 1 Luma; more powerful passives can cost 10, 15, or more. Oh, and of course you can freely move Pictos and Luma around at no penalty (there are respec items for base stats though)!
What gets the juices really flowing are the synergies and tradeoffs. Each character can equip three Pictos apiece, and while so equipped, the passive is granted without spending Luma. Thing is, there is usually an inverse relationship between how much Luma it would otherwise take to get the passive, and the raw bonus stats on the Picto itself. A given Picto might have +50 Speed and +15% Crit Chance, for example, but contains a passive that only saves you 3 Luma. Meanwhile, that 20 Luma passive is attached to like a +300 HP brick.
…which can be still be helpful if one of your characters is wielding a weapon that doubles as damage taken in exchange for another bonus. The downside of which you are mitigating with a passive that reduces damage taken by 50% but you cannot be healed by spells. No worries, just stack a bunch of +HP Picos and practice your sweet, sweet dance (dodge) moves.
Now, think about The Outer Worlds 2 in comparison. There is none!
Yeah, these are not the same type of games, so of course they are not set up in the same way. But there will be people who argue that you choosing Engineering and Medical on the character select screen in TOW2 is some deep gesture of customization when it is, in fact, an a priori straightjacket that railroads your entire playthrough. “I’m roleplaying though!” Roleplaying… what? Arbitrary Man?
Anyway. All I’m saying is that I am wherever I am in the game, and already have more than 40 Pictos to choose from. And unlike in TOW2, I am actually choosing builds and testing them out, because I am not expressly penalized for doing so. That’s some good, engaging game design.
Maybe Obsidian should take notes.
Posted in Commentary
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Tags: Armchair Game Development, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Customization, Game Design, The Outer Worlds 2