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.