Mewgenics Review: The Quintessence of Randomness and Cats

Mewgenics literally came out of nowhere and, in just a few days, became the absolute hit of February 2026. At first glance, it seems like a typical turn-based tactical strategy game with roguelike elements and a quirky visual style — so why all the hype, as if a media revolution had happened? We spent dozens of hours in Edmund McMillen’s latest creation to unravel the “magic” of Mewgenics and understand why players are flocking en masse to breed cats. At the same time, we’ll answer the main question: is this really the masterpiece of the year, or just empty hype?

At first glance, Mewgenics is a standard turn-based tactics game with RPG elements and roguelike mechanics, only with a cat theme. You get a squad of four cats with different stats, assign them classic D&D roles (mage, rogue, tank, cleric), and set off on an adventure. Most of your time is spent on 10×10 grid battlefields, fighting enemies. The combat system, movement, and use of abilities — all this we’ve already seen in dozens of other turn-based strategies. Sadly, Mewgenics doesn’t offer anything radically new in terms of mechanics.

The core of Mewgenics isn’t its mechanics, but its concept and overall game design. This is a game about cats for those who are tired of cuteness and the universal love for felines. There’s no cuddling or petting like in Stray — here, you’re engaged in selective breeding, raising strong and resilient specimens. The very name “Mewgenics” (a reference to the notorious “eugenics”) hints at it: cat breeding is presented in its most grim and cynical form. The weak go down the drain, the healthy go to the battlefield. Mating, deadly fights, and other unconventional things are shown without embellishment, though through a lens of dark humor. But if you’re not familiar with McMillen’s work, this concept will take some getting used to.

Cats in Mewgenics are simply expendable, and the game does everything it can to kill that excessive love for fluffies that social networks and YouTube have ingrained in you. Want to upgrade your house or expand your inventory? You’ll have to give your pets to strange and creepy NPCs — and only God knows what they do with them. And you can’t just dump your “retirees” (cats who returned from a raid and are no longer fit for battle). One merchant demands kittens in exchange for useful breeding tips — and each time, he wants more. Another, a boy who offers home decor, asks for wounded and maimed cats. The more broken bones and torn wounds they have, the more valuable they are to him.

In the first ten hours, it’s very hard to part with your cats — after all, you’ve been through fire and water with your retirees, clawing out victory in the toughest battles. It’s also a shame to give away stray cats that made it home — they often have interesting passive skills. But there’s simply no other way to progress in Mewgenics. Sooner or later, you’ll have to cross that line and start seeing animals as resources for further victories, not as pets you collect like Pokémon.

Mewgenics has management on the level of XCOM, and if you want to beat the game and win all the battles, you’ll have to put in a lot of effort even during the preparation stage. Weak specimens — either scrap them right away or trade them to merchants. Keep the stronger ones for raids and try to protect them from fights, which often break out between cats. It’s also important to keep track of which adult cats live in your house so that, at the end of the day, only the best of the best mate and produce offspring with potentially great perks and abilities.

The selection process itself takes place at your base — in a simply drawn, two-dimensional house where your furry squad scurries around. You can upgrade your home and decorate it as you develop relationships with certain merchants. The better, cleaner, and more comfortable your house is, the more productive the breeding process will be, and the higher the quality of the kittens.

Each cat has its own set of perks and key stats: strength, agility, intelligence, charisma, and so on. All of these affect combat effectiveness and the class you assign to each cat by giving them collars. For example, if a cat has the “Short Arc” skill and fires ranged projectiles, it’s definitely a rogue. If a kitten is born with a healing-at-range skill, it’s a natural-born cleric from the start. As the adventure progresses, cats will level up and unlock new perks and stats, but it’s the starting skills that determine how effective a fighter will be from the get-go.

All the randomness in the breeding mode happens after you press the “End Day” button. Some cats will automatically choose a mate, taking into account orientation and libido, while others will fight each other — the winner receives an additional random ability, while the loser either dies or gets injured, resulting in a penalty to a certain stat. The mating and birthing process can be made more civilized by enabling a specific setting in the menu, since in the default mode all of this looks rather wild and absurd, even considering the peculiar art and animations.

At first, breeding happens randomly, and Mewgenics doesn’t really explain how to do things correctly. Your cats will start fighting among themselves, and often the stronger retirees end up killing the young. Weaker cats tend to interact with each other more often, ignoring potentially better partners. Because of this, it’s difficult to assemble a truly effective combat squad: in the end, you just send whoever you have on a raid and hope to level them up later. Due to the vague tutorial and unclear conditions, it’s impossible to figure out on your own how to properly distribute cats or start seeing them as resources rather than pets. And while in the first five to ten raids this doesn’t really affect progression due to the relatively simple battles, later on, not understanding the in-game breeding processes leads to failed raids and slower progression.

The local interface causes twice as many problems. For example, the game doesn’t have a table with all your cats that would let you instantly get complete information on every individual. Instead, you have to flip through them in a separate menu or click on each one in the house. The marking tools don’t really help with sorting, so you have to manually go through all your creatures and memorize their names. By the way, it wasn’t until the 20th hour that we figured out what the icons on the house meant — the ones showing the number of beds, comfort, and so on. The game itself doesn’t even hint at this.

During the squad formation stage, where you assign class collars, there’s also an element of randomness that assigns cats their abilities and passive skills. This means you simply can’t pick the right specialty for a particular fighter — the extra set is hidden behind “question marks” and is only revealed after you press the “Done” button. On top of that, you can’t pre-build a setup for specific items from your inventory, since all equipment is on a different screen, and you only get access to it after choosing classes. Of course, you could memorize all the items or write them down on a separate sheet to make your squad as effective as possible, but who in their right mind would do that?

As a result, all your breeding efforts can turn out to be useless if the class abilities don’t match the base stats inherited from the cat’s parents. You end up with an ineffective fighter with mismatched skills, and since each class has over 70 abilities, you’ll have to pray to the RNG gods that at least one of your four gets a good set. Otherwise, the whole adventure is doomed from the start. Sure, during the raid you can try to fix things by picking suitable perks and skills as you level up, but that doesn’t change the fact that all this breeding and class selection is pure randomness dressed up in gameplay fluff.

Mewgenics features a ton of equipment items that make your crew stronger and more effective. Unfortunately, they’re not durable and will break over time. For example, a lion’s mane hat will get the “Worn” status after a raid. This means that after the next run, it has a 50% chance of breaking. Overall, the game doesn’t encourage repetitive runs and does everything it can to make you constantly invent new builds — as is typical for the roguelike genre.

However, a word of warning: don’t rush to throw away or hand over your veteran cats to crazy merchants, as we did in the early stages. Later on, random events will occur where battle-hardened fighters play a crucial role and can prevent sudden attacks. But there’s no point in hoarding retirees either, since they take up precious bed space in your house that could go to more important, younger cats for progression. In short, always think through every step, despite all the randomness.

The raid system in Mewgenics looks like a standard map with events and branching paths, reminiscent of Inscryption and other indie roguelikes. At first, only one route is available, but as the story progresses, you’ll be able to choose — either stick to the familiar path or venture into a more challenging route with valuable rewards. However, there’s no real branching with different stages, enemy sets, or unexpected situations like in The Binding of Isaac. If you don’t want extra challenges and prefer more resources with less time investment (or maybe more, if the battles turn out to be too tough), just pick the easy route and complete the raid to unlock new content or story dialogue. Where randomness is truly needed, the game doesn’t deliver enough, turning each raid into a Groundhog Day scenario. Only minor details, like weather or the number of enemies, actually change.

The only thing that’s really randomized in raids is the random events that happen between battles. For example, you might stumble upon a strange stone and get several choices for what to do. Moreover, each action must fit the stats of the cat that the game automatically selects. So, if you want to touch the weird stone but your cat has low luck, it will receive a negative debuff.

In one of our raids, our tank failed such a check, even though his stats were perfect for it. As a result, he got the “Confusion” perk, and from then on every one of his actions was random: instead of hitting an enemy, he’d damage himself or use terrible abilities on his teammates. On top of that, some enemies can infect your team with fleas, ticks, and other parasites, which can ruin the rest of the raid if you don’t have the right talents or items on hand.

Battles in Mewgenics take place on compact 10x10 maps. There are countless enemies, and they sometimes get various modifiers that can cause a lot of trouble if you don’t read their descriptions. For example, if your ranged attacker with low health is keeping away from tiny mice, that doesn’t mean they’re safe — the enemies can use a “Dash” skill to fly straight across the map. Later, beasts appear that infect your cats with parasites or kill them outright, blocking resurrection. It’s important to remember that all injuries stay with your cats until the end of the raid. Broken legs, scratched backs, gouged eyes, and other wounds can become a serious obstacle in boss fights, where your squad’s effectiveness needs to be at its peak.

Since we’ve mentioned bosses, it’s worth talking about them in more detail. At first, they don’t seem particularly dangerous — especially if you’re familiar with tactical games. But after the first act, the battles turn into real challenges. The AI here isn’t exactly brilliant and mostly acts according to set patterns, but the RNG will do everything it can to put you in a hopeless situation. You have to claw your way to victory using experience gained from hundreds of hours in XCOM. Despite the game’s attempts to throw curveballs, we managed to act unconventionally and, in most cases, simply broke the bosses’ logic. It’s hard to imagine what awaits players whose only experience is playing Baldur's Gate 3 on easy mode.

For example, the “Stray Cat” boss got stuck on a tile between two rocks, while two of our fighters pinned it in from the other sides and pummeled it, preventing it from using its abilities. Another boss, made up of two mutants spraying some strange goo, can also be beaten by pinning them and directing their attacks at each other. The rest of the bosses aren’t a problem either, as long as you figure out their behavior. The main thing is to endure a few failed attempts and remember at least the rough sequence of the main villains’ actions. In our experience, they rarely act unpredictably, and experienced tacticians can only lose to them because of bad RNG that refuses to give useful items and perks.

What’s truly annoying in battles is the lack of proper information windows that would help you clearly understand which factors, mutations, abilities, and modifiers are being used or activated. For example, during rain you get the “Wet” debuff — but what it does and what it affects is unclear until you test it yourself. Some might say, “That’s just how RNG works.” But we’d argue: it’s a poorly thought-out element that causes inconvenience. In tactical battles, information is crucial — it lets you calculate hit chances and weigh all risks before making a decision. What happens in the game can be described like this: you deal damage, suddenly everything around takes damage, some enemy dashes and crashes into a trash bag, taking damage, then your tank takes damage, and another enemy gets extra armor and an extra action point. Sometimes battles go by the book, but more often than not, it’s just chaos. Sure, from one perspective it’s fun — if most negative effects hit the enemy team. But it’s much more frustrating when your cat suddenly dies on turn two just because modifiers and perks all got mixed together.

If you play Mewgenics like a regular roguelike and not a tactical strategy, relying only on builds and gear, the project reveals a different side. Fans of “Munchkin” will love the opportunities to use various items, try out new abilities that drop when leveling up, and so on. The game has a classic system of environmental interaction, where water conducts electricity and fire sets grass (along with enemies) ablaze.

If you don’t bother too much with management and tactics, the game won’t get any harder — RNG will mess up your plans anyway. At some point, we stopped worrying and played Mewgenics like The Binding of Isaac. And believe me, in most cases we completed raids just as well as with careful tactics and breeding. Because of this, we constantly felt like launching the game again and running another raid to see new content or take on battles with a fresh set of modifiers.

Unlike the aforementioned The Binding of Isaac, Mewgenics features a full-fledged campaign with story and side quests that unlock as you progress through raids. These not only deliver amusing dialogues and open up new content, but also present interesting situations that play out both in battles and throughout the raids in general. For example, in one fight we were given a time limit to make our move. Didn’t come up with a tactic or pick a position in time? The AI will take over and make all the decisions for you. There are quite a few quests and random events in the game, judging by how many raids we’ve been through. The main thing is to get through the first couple of adventures, which essentially serve as an introduction and a test of your endurance.

There’s not much to say about the story itself. This isn’t Inscryption, and certainly not Hades, where dialogue and narrative are central to the game design. Instead, you get a set of gags and jokes from McMillen that will appeal to fans of dark humor and sarcasm. Personally, I, the author of these lines, have long outgrown Edmund’s humor and viewed the dialogues, poop jokes, and grimness as just a classic set of the designer’s signature style. Still, I have to mention a great joke where the game designer curses and inflicts other penalties if you try to save-scum during battles. I admit, I did it on purpose once, and the other times I was just curious to see what would happen. No spoilers — check it out for yourself!

The visuals in Mewgenics are pure McMillen style, especially when Tommy Refenes (who insisted on proper art for Super Meat Boy) isn’t around to rein him in. Refenes, by the way, worked with Edmund on the first version of Mewgenics back in 2012 (then called Mew-Genics), but after creative struggles, the duo split, and Tommy handed the project rights over to McMillen.

Without any art direction, the designer delivered rough sketches with sloppy lines reminiscent of early 2000s flash games — and called it a style. Honestly, the visuals are an acquired taste. Sure, Edmund’s signature features — poop, flies, gross-out humor, and black comedy — are all here, but considering the artist has shown real talent before, it’s odd to see this at launch.

Animations are also done in the standard flash style, with objects made from separate pieces on an invisible skeleton. After so many indie projects with gorgeous visuals like Hollow Knight (also made by a small team), it’s hard to call Mewgenics’ visuals outstanding. Yes, they’re simple. Yes, they have flair. But rough sketches are still rough sketches, and the game would have benefited from real artwork.

Where Mewgenics truly shines is in its sound and music. In addition to background tracks and jingles, there are full songs with funny lyrics that play both on the breeding screen and during climactic boss fights. Each track even has its own variations, so the RNG works in the in-game playlist too. And of course, the cats’ voice acting deserves a mention. Not only random people, but some celebrities lent their voices to the cats. The idea is genuinely cool.

There’s nothing to complain about in terms of performance or technical state. This isn’t a blockbuster that demands top-tier hardware, so Mewgenics runs perfectly fine on 10-year-old PCs. No bugs, no lags, no noticeable issues.

Mewgenics isn’t a perfect turn-based strategy or a complex cat breeding sim packed with endless stats. It’s a classic, well-designed, content-rich roguelike. But unfortunately, it’s far from The Binding of Isaac and definitely not the masterpiece some online claim it to be. At least for now, the game has plenty of problems with balance and in-game economy, as well as an overabundance of RNG that reduces all tactics to a single “correct” solution. Still, despite its flaws, the game keeps drawing you back in — just to unwind and laugh at the madness happening on screen.

Hopefully, in his next project, McMillen will spend a bit more time on mechanics and visuals. Sketches instead of real art and RNG instead of game design might have worked this time, but they’re unlikely to be received with the same enthusiasm in the future.