[Game: Mewgenics, Edmund McMillen/Tyler Glaiel, 2026]

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Across the Mewniverse:

Introduction:

Mewgenics is a tactics games, meaning it resides in a subgenre of turn-based strategy games in which you move a team of units around a (usually grid-based) battlefield. That’s a type of game which has captured a lot of my time and attention over the past decade. A sampling of the titles matching that description which I’ve played to completion at least once in that time includes XCOM: Enemy Unknown, XCOM 2, XCOM: Chimera Squad, Phoenix Point, The Banner Saga, Ikenfell, Advance Wars, Advance Wars 2, Wargroove, Tactical Breach Wizards, Invisible, Inc., Chroma Squad, Civilization V, Into the Breach, SteamWorld Heist, SteamWorld Heist II, Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade, and both the physical and digital versions of Gloomhaven.

And the games by Edmund McMillen and his collaborators that I’ve played through on a similar timescale include . . . all of them. All of them on Steam, anyway. Even Fingered, The Legend of Bum-Bo, and everything in The Basement Collection. I’ve also played Tyler Glaiel’s most famous project apart from his collaborations with Ed, the puzzle game Closure.

So, the question I’ll be answering here is: where do I find the time? Just kidding. The real question is: from that vantage point, how does Mewgenics stack up? How does it measure up to its peers in the tactics genre, and to the impressive catalogs of its creators?

And the answer is: extremely well, for the most part. But speaking from the other side of finishing Mewgenics’ rather lengthy main campaign, I can tell you it has a fair share of imperfections as well. Note that while I will avoid spoiling any of Mewgenics’ several true final boss encounters (and some select story beats and designs that are best left as surprises), I will otherwise be including screenshots of relevant gameplay from throughout my time playing it.

Gameplay and Progression in Mewgenics:

Even before the seeming inevitability of expansions for it, Mewgenics is undoubtedly one of the most dynamic and varied tactics games in existence.

You can begin to see this by zeroing in on a single adventuring party of four cats. Just speaking of variation relevant to the core gameplay, an individual cat in your party can vary from another in terms of stats, abilities, spells, assignment of one of 14 class roles, primarily mechanical modifiers classed as ‘disorders,’ primarily statistical modifiers classed as ‘mutations,’ persistent stat reductions classed as ‘injuries,’ control over one or more familiars, and assigned equipment occupying each of 5 equipment slots per cat.

If it counted as a summary of all of the noteworthy variety in the game, that list would represent an admirable amount of mechanical variation. But that’s far from the full story.

As with player units, the mechanical inventiveness in the enemies, minibosses, and bosses is truly commendable. The over 200 specific opponents you’ll face offer a panoply of unique designs to require on-the-fly strategizing. As a point of reference, even including its DLC content there are fewer than 20 unique enemy types in XCOM: Enemy Unknown. And Mewgenics is not just repeatedly reskinning the typical tactics game mechanical routine of infantry, archers, and tanks.

There are stompers and dashers and flying enemies and mana drains and snares and berserkers and area deniers and reflectors and bombers and snipers and magicians and bait enemies and reactive enemies and transforming enemies and terrain changers and charmers and healers and stunners and spawners and shielders and multi-shielders and multi-hitters and specialists in every status ailment and every elemental type and every player class and (genuinely) so much more. One of the greatest virtues of having so very many individual enemies in the game is that the enemies are almost all unique within any given zone of the game. Thus, as Mewgenics branches out into almost 20 such zones, a feeling of real progression and movement through the gameworld emerges.

So, keep all that in mind when I now say, in mechanical terms, I was most impressed by the boss designs, which kept surprising me with new demands and new ideas all the way through. Nearly every single solitary miniboss and boss has its own bespoke mechanical identity. Not just its own personality. Even in scenarios that feel purpose-built to allow the devs to reuse existing work, like the escalating Guillotina encounters or Mama Maggot and the Rat King, the fights are still meaningfully differentiated in terms of boss moveset and animations. In a genre packed with boss encounters that are just dudes with extra armor or with the ability to possess one of your units, packed with bosses that can be approached with almost the exact same strategy used everywhere else in their respective games—this level of care and attention in mechanically personalizing every encounter stands out.

To put it in terms of the most recent prior indie success in this genre, if you’ve played through Tactical Breach Wizards then you know it has an excellent final boss encounter, which requires the player to use their units in new and unique ways. It doesn’t just demand the most out of the player in terms of implementing the strategies they’ve developed throughout the game; it demands the most out of the player in terms of strategizing, of devising strategies with known tools to meet new needs in the moment. Well, Mewgenics is a game with over a dozen bosses that feel that way the first couple times you encounter them. The Dybbuk, Zodiac, the Crater Maker, the Abandoned Ones, the Man in the Moon, Stacy, Cerberubs, Pyrophina, the Coven, Dreadnoughtus, Zapphauser, and the Mother could each easily serve as a satisfactory final boss of a tactics game. But none of them are even the final boss of their own level sequence; some of those fights are actually designated as minibosses.

And while I personally wouldn’t have minded things opening up a little faster, I’ll also say that the roll-out of Mewgenics’ content is relatively well-paced. It’s unlikely a player will fail to unlock a substantial chunk of new stuff when succeeding in a run until they’re over 50 hours into the game. And layered over or between all of that are still further systems or variations, including random events governed by DnD-like skill checks, rare set bonuses for consistent armor equips, a surprising variety of weather and related environmental modifiers, and an array of optional challenge runs designated as ‘side quests.’

The key here is not simply that there is a large amount of unique content in the game, but that quality has not suffered for this extraordinary quantity. The numerous abilities, spells, and items meet in numerous overlapping synergies. The enemies and bosses demand distinct and thoughtful approaches. The array of available stats for each unit are all useful and, situationally, all worth prioritizing for improvement.

To say that Mewgenics’ incredible amount of content is ‘balanced’ would be a lie. But to say that it is imbalanced is not to insult it. As in The Binding of Isaac, in some runs you’re unbeatable, in some things feel balanced, and in others you’re scraping by. And there is drama and delight when succeeding in any such mode. There’s a case to be made that assembling unbeatable runs is actually a little too easy to do in Mewgenics, but so far I’ve been able to address that by stacking multiple side quests with compatible routes into singular runs (and while I’ve had a lot of luck in hard mode so far, I’m confident the higher difficulty settings will eventually offer a similar cure).

Just the fact that there are eventually 14 classes to choose from when filling out a party of four contributes a huge amount to making runs feel distinct from each other. And, while some classes tend to be weaker or more situational (like the Psychic and Tinkerer) and others tend to be stronger or more versatile (like the Butcher and Hunter), I believe I’ve had insurmountable and puny cats occupying each and every class in the game.

Anyway, I’ll turn now to a topic you may be surprised I haven’t mentioned until this point in the review, which is the highly-marketed cat breeding system. Like an XCOM game, Mewgenics is divided between a tactical layer and a management layer. But in addition to XCOM-like management of inventories and base upgrades, Mewgenics has (in place of simple troop recruitment) the adoption and breeding of generations of animal sims.

This is why I had to clarify at the start of this section that I was only listing tactical variation between cats there—because each cat is further differentiated in ways that either pertain exclusively to the management layer of the game or are purely aesthetic. They have different fur colors and patterns, different available shapes for each non-mutant body segment, different names, different vocal performers, different libidos, different temperaments, different levels of genetic diversity, can acquire attachment or distaste for particular peers, are assigned one of three biological sex classifications, are assigned one of three sexual orientations, and age at a rate of one year per in-game day from kitten to adult to elder to (if not otherwise destined) death by natural causes.

The goal of this aspect of the game is, as the game’s provocative title implies, to cultivate cats with high base stats and favorable mutations. But for a variety of reasons, from the ethical to the aesthetic to the mechanical, the developers wisely decided not to give the player the ability to actively enforce interaction between specific feline pairs. Instead, cats have a chance to fight or be friendly with each other on any given in-game night. Whether an interaction (and which interaction) occurs on any given night between any two cats kept in the same room comes down to a combination of that array of factors just described and a healthy dose of random chance. The process can be influenced to some degree by deploying furniture to enhance the environment in which the cats live, but the results will always involve some rolling of digital dice. Thus the reality of the situation ends up, appropriately enough, like herding cats. (The ability to assign symbols to them for organizational purposes, however, is a welcome compromise on the chaos.)

You can’t just sit in the house and keep rolling forever until the cats come out right, as they require food to survive and most player households will consume food faster than the local market can replenish it, similar to needing raw materials and money from missions in XCOM in order to make progress with mechanics in the base. I feel the food system and the relative randomization of the breeding system work well in tandem to force the player to (at least occasionally) go adventuring with less-than-ideal or unfavorably mutated cats. It seemed like a shallow and highly random system at first glance, and does still pale in comparison to the depth of the tactics gameplay—but with the added tools and info from Tink you gain enough influence over the process to access cats with max base stats (all sevens) before the end of the main campaign. And as for those that don’t suit the needs of the campaign, townsfolk are generally happy to take them off your hands in return for rewards.

Now, on the subject of those townsfolk, I should address one common point of criticism that I don’t think is entirely merited: I see little wrong with the quantity of cats various NPCs demand in return for upgrades. Many have balked at the numbers and called it grindy.

I think the problem may be Frank setting the wrong expectations, since players see his request for 25 veterans so early on. But Frank should be the lowest priority for receiving cats. Acquiring additional rooms beyond the starting room and the attic has low tactical utility compared to the rewards from every other townsperson. People prioritizing cats to Frank and becoming upset at the ‘grind’ are doing the strategic equivalent of a chef looking at an empty dumpster behind their restaurant and saying, “Look at the size of this thing! I better get to work cooking so I can fill it up fast.”

But you may recall when I started discussing this that I said it was criticism that wasn’t “entirely merited.” That implies it is still merited. And that’s true, but not because of anything a player would encounter in their first hundred hours or so. It’s true because the final upgrade from Frank and the last couple upgrades from Butch and the mystery man are actually pretty unreasonable. They wouldn’t be fulfilled in the normal course of playing through to the conclusion of the story, except perhaps by players immediately opting into the higher difficulty settings. It’s possible DLC campaign content could bring the ratios into balance, but I doubt a DLC would launch for Mewgenics with only expansions to the tactics half of the game, so things would likely remain disproportionate.

Anyway, stepping back from such details, mechanically speaking the game is a triumph . . . apart from the bigger issues I’ll be covering now.

Tactical Clarity and Visual Design in Mewgenics:

A discussion of the visuals of Mewgenics should start with some degree of praise. After all, as a whole the game is second only to The End is Nigh in terms of showcasing Edmund McMillen’s ability as a visual artist. And what it lacks in comparison to the consistency and style of The End is Nigh, it makes up for in variation and creativity. Every last one of those hundreds of individual units discussed in the prior section has its own custom animation when it’s low on health, and the majority of the enemy types have custom art for their double-health, double-turn variants. And while some designs (some cat-based enemies and many player cats) do bear the messy, rough look of McMillen projects like Fingered or the original flash version of The Binding of Isaac, most are more polished or interesting and some (particularly in Act 3) have a huge amount of charm, personality, and comedy infused into them.

Yet even setting aside mixed aesthetic judgments, the visual design of Mewgenics is far from faultless. And that’s because its main problems relate to the visuals’ responsibility of communicating information to the player.

Specifically, in order to maintain the commitment to single-screen combat scenarios like FTL or Into the Breach (or The Binding of Isaac, for that matter) despite a higher number of occluding details, some of the clarity a player should be able to expect from a strategy game is sacrificed here. Characters and scenery being close together on the grid, especially near the top corner or near the left corner or when one is more than a tile in size, can easily obscure each other or be obscured by status indicators or the turn order display.

The problem seems to stem from Mewgenics’ combination of a fixed faux-isometric 2D perspective with the chunky, thick-outline, kid-making-a-comic-book-or-flash-game visual style Ed is known for. The only way to unambiguously present a layout with such large, opaque scenery would’ve been a top-down view. Compare this to how perspective is handled in Into the Breach, where the board is tipped much closer to a top-down view and the visual content of a single tile almost never exceeds its borders by more than a thin margin. The character-locked lists of status effects don’t help either, and making those lists ‘hover only’ in the settings to address the problem is unwise since they provide such vital information.

The compromise Mewgenics provides is a togglable tactical view that shows enemies and allies as tokens on the grid while hiding foreground objects—although even then small enemies hiding behind objects or characters will go unnoticed if the player is not habitually checking the tactical view every few turns, and obviously it would be far preferable if the game’s actual art communicated scenarios clearly.

The situation is not aided by the muddiness contributed by its muted color palette. Now, in terms of taste I don’t mind the pastel style and I don’t mind the various visual noise filters. I do find myself wishing the game was the slightest bit more vibrant, at least on rare occasions for variety and emphasis—but the chosen look of it sells the grime of its world while retaining some semblance of readability. Smart touches, like recoloring the cats’ fur according to their class collars while broadly avoiding matching the class colors in enemy designs, do aid tremendously in that retention of readability. Unfortunately, often things still end up a gray, tan, or brown morass.

The lack of clarity, sadly, extends out of Mewgenics‘ visuals and into the ability and item descriptions—tolerable in something as mechanically loose, improvisational, and fast-paced as The Binding of Isaac, but totally inappropriate in a turn-based strategy game. The same phrasing sometimes refers to two different effects, particularly as regards range; simple build info is often inaccessible during decision points where it matters most; and I don’t think there’s any way to distinguish beforehand whether a familiar will be manually controlled or automatically controlled.

At a bare minimum, base range should be added to all ability and active item descriptions; mana capacity should be listed on the inventory and level-up screens; the inventory should be accessible from inside shops; the health of grabbed allies should be possible to check; base crit chance should be visible somewhere; and some way of checking teammates’ abilities when it’s not their turn in battle should be implemented. In an ideal world, Mewgenics would also preview the actual change to attack damage, spell damage, health, mana, and other stats when mousing over upgrades and items, since the correspondence of character stats to those quantities is not one-to-one. Moreover, some of the complaints people have about the mage and psychic classes would dissolve if it was possible to check line-of-sight from any tile on the grid without occupying it.

A more subtle issue of tactical clarity in the game is that you can’t choose the route a cat takes to a selected tile. If there is a concealed trap or a disguised enemy along the path, cats will sometimes opt for sub-optimal direct routes that unnecessarily bring them through the trap regardless of the player’s awareness of the hazard and regardless of the cat having sufficient movement to avoid it. This is a common problem when facing the early-game miniboss Fenrir, but crops up occasionally in most runs. They don’t need to enable incremental movement; not having that is a valid mechanical choice. But they should offer a toggle between automatic and manual pathing up to a character’s max distance, per move action. Pickups are only secured when a move action concludes, so it shouldn’t significantly harm game balance to allow this.

Anyway, all of Mewgenics’ deficits of clarity or control make it particularly jarring that the game offers no single-step undo, even for simple movement actions. For a roguelike strategy game with such long runs and such messy visuals to both fail to offer any kind of protection against simple misclicks and offer punishments to players for resetting combat encounters . . . is a recipe for unnecessary frustration.

To be clear, I’m not saying these issues frustrate me personally. For reference, I found the game to start off so easy that I didn’t lose a run until about 25 hours in. To this day I have no idea what the consequences of losing a home defense mission are, as I’ve never lost one. I didn’t even become aware of the Steven reset mechanic until I had access to all of Act 2.

When imagining a version of this game without any of its existing clarity and control problems, I immediately become a big fan of Steven’s escalating punishments for resets; enforcement of player decisions and in-game luck can be a powerful tool for raising the stakes and impact of a game. But I can still see the system as it stands as noticeably imperfect, and likely to annoy players who are newer to the genre. All in all, while never entirely ugly or entirely confusing, Mewgenics could undoubtedly stand to look a little nicer, control a little more reliably, and read a little clearer.

Now, the previous section was mostly praise and this one mostly criticism, but where we’re going next will have a fair share of both.

Writing and Music in Mewgenics:

The stylistic peers of Mewgenics lived and died a generation ago. Invader Zim and Happy Tree Friends and Banana Phone and Magical Trevor and Making Fiends and (ironically) The Decline of Video Gaming are all long gone. Madness Combat stumbled out of the desert for a gulp of water a couple years ago, but is in terms of cultural relevance as dead as the rest. I was highly entertained by that stuff when it was fresh. I was about 8 years old at the time. There are a few standout bits of creativity from that era that hold up, and The Behemoth is still making (or at least updating) games. But even Zim, arguably the best of the bunch, can be pretty hit-or-miss on a revisit 25 years later. It was a time of verdant invention and expression by an array of new voices; it was also a time of cringeworthy attempts at trope and shock humor mostly appreciated by prepubescents.

In many ways Edmund McMillen is the last vestige of real success in that style. And Ed embodies not just the visual and mechanical sensibilities of the Newgrounds era but also its specific sense of humor. People are fond of labeling this style ‘edgy,’ but I’m not so sure it even rises to that level most of the time. Sure, occasionally it’s dark humor where the little cartoon animals get ripped in half or you find a dead fetus or something.

But at least as often in Mewgenics its early-2000s sensibilities emerge in simple children’s comedy, like the doctor making a machine that farts or one of your cats eating some poo. The game is rarely even as gross or strange as 80s Garbage Pail Kids material, so it’s pretty tame stuff—and often falls short of prompting either disgust or laughter. And when it’s not acting like people are still scandalized by words they weren’t supposed to say in elementary school, it’s presenting characters that might’ve seemed like relevant caricatures 25 years ago—like a merchant who is dangerously and myopically obsessed with animal rights. As part of Ed’s most recent attempt to bait PETA into a mutual exchange of publicity, Tracy represents a mild arguable success; as part of Ed’s most recent attempt to include engaging satire in his creative work, Tracy represents an out-of-touch one-note political cartoon.

A similarly one-note figure that frequently tries and seldom succeeds to make me laugh is Dr. Beanies himself, who feels like he is constantly on the verge of saying something funny or interesting. Nowhere is this missed opportunity more palpable than in his introductions of the side quest objects. Most of them make the same joke, that Beanies would find it humorous and nominally scientific for you to adventure with the item. The repetitious style of these item intros is not aided by the facts that (1) the dialogues repeat without variation for any given quest, (2) they share an opening line across all quests, and (3) side quests are offered at random. The greatest benefit I got from finishing the last side quest was no longer having to spin the doctor’s roulette of bland stand-up routines.

There’s also a dude who unlocks analytics and stats for the cat breeding (among other stuff), where the whole joke is that he’s very effeminate. That’s it. I guess it’s technically ambiguous whether the wife he constantly mentions is real, but I don’t think it really matters. Either way, the joke is the same: his name is Tink and he wears an all-pink outfit and he’s vain and gossipy and adopts legions of kittens to raise in place of children. I think the idea was for him to be in juxtaposition with Butch—who wears only black, has the same hair and mustache, and hints that the two are brothers—to make some kind of point about nature versus nurture. But Butch’s lines aren’t generally about his being masculine; they’re mostly split between fairly grounded explanations of game mechanics, and jokes about failed schemes to impel gangs of cats to commit crimes (which all brings him into a much closer comparison to the player-character than to his sibling). In Tink’s case, Tink himself is generally the punchline.

They’re not all this bad. A couple characters actually feel new and unique and creative. I do like the furniture merchant, Baby Jack, for example. He’s a kid selling the collapsed pile of furniture which has buried his grandmother, and he believes so strongly in the sentiment that ‘what does not kill you makes you stronger’ that he’s intentionally injuring himself in order to ‘power up.’ Frank is alright too; he makes it clear fairly early on that he’s a corpse assembled back into a person by the sentient filth in the sewer. That’s original stuff! The writing isn’t devoid of fun or interesting moments now and then, but at some level it does feel like we’re just kinda nodding along at Ed and saying, ‘You keep making games that are fun to play, and we’ll keep letting you pretend a poop emoji or a man in pink is the height of comedy.’

Overall, the story stuff in Mewgenics makes you realize that part of why Isaac and Meat Boy come across so well is that there’s so little dialogue in them. And with The Binding of Isaac in particular, there was another angle, which is that the whole game is filtered through Isaac’s point-of-view. Like the campfire storytelling scene in Stand By Me, The Binding of Isaac captures the raw and unfiltered and unwholesome nature of immature creativity. It’s about an especially bad outcome of neglect and religious repression, by a parent who fails to understand how young artists explore taboos and mature as they age. Of course it’s juvenile and disturbing—it’s a corrupted hypoxic nightmare in the dying mind of an abused 5-year-old!

But Mewgenics offers a far thinner and less interesting thematic layer to justify its pre-teen presentation. The best we’ve got here is that Boon county might be the way it is because Dr. Beanies treats people the same way he treats cats. Along those lines (taking care here to skirt around Act 3 spoilers) I’ll say the team was at least shrewd enough to directly confront the elephant in the room, namely eugenics, by explicitly tying the notion of ‘genetic purity’ to the notions of exploitative, mutation-prone inbreeding and dehumanizing societal stagnation. Still, it must be said that most of the writing in Mewgenics seems a lot less interested in that stuff than in telling easy trope jokes with its characters. Isaac and Aether and even The End is Nigh prove Ed is capable of telling better stories in his games than what we’re getting here.

And the folks I’ve seen praising the game for promoting care for specific mutant cats are out of their minds; it absolutely does not do that. It’s fine that it doesn’t do that, but there’s no sense pretending that it does. It prevents you from naming the cats, sharply restricts the utility of cats who have survived an adventure, and massively incentivizes the aggressive disposal of sub-par combatants to any of the town’s locals or, failing that, a trash can.

Ed and Tyler have done a surprisingly good job of presenting various disorders and diseases as mechanically complex, offering differences that may be benefits or detriments depending on how the player interacts with them. But the same can not be said about their presentation of cosmetic mutations, many of which offer flat mods to stats. Having floppy ears simply subtracts 2 from intelligence; having a cleft lip simply subtracts 2 from charisma. These aren’t interesting choices, and don’t follow logically. I see no reason for a drooping ear to always have a negative impact on intelligence, and have no trouble imagining a cat with a cleft lip that is more ‘charismatic’ than one without. Having such modifiers randomly select among an intentional range of values would have served the game better in this regard.

Now, although I am underwhelmed by Mewgenics’ sense of humor and story, I should be clear that this doesn’t mean I am opposed to its sense of style. I am not troubled by the fact that Edmund McMillen has a well-above-average level of interest in tumors and piss. There are far more games (more worthy of derision) that feel like they have no personality whatsoever than games with a highly distinct personality that simply doesn’t always land. I just wish, when it came time for that style to be shaped into narrative and comedy, that the former would make me think or feel and the latter would make me laugh.

And as proof that those things are not mutually exclusive, I’ll close this section by pointing out that all of Ridiculon and friends’ music for the game (together with the improv on Boon county’s fictional radio station, mostly by Matthias Bossi) is hilarious and fantastic and even occasionally artistically complex. It noticeably enhances the gameplay and basically saves the vibe of the management part of the game. The music is generally no less scatological or puerile than the rest of Mewgenics, but it has a layer of cleverness that the rest of the writing lacks; the lyrics are packed with puns and creative turns of phrase and unexpected rhymes.

Bossi and Evans and their collaborators were able to push through the valley of bad taste into the vaunted realm of camp. The boss tracks sound like someone gleefully dipped some vocal jazz, showtunes, and other mid-century Americana into a vat of nuclear waste. It’s got the genre versatility, quirkiness, and lyrical creativity of a band like Ween or They Might Be Giants. Standout songs include the themes for Guillotina, Boris, the desert bosses, the lab bosses, and a couple of the true final bosses. And speaking as someone with a wonderful mother whom I love, I still have to call out the radio station variant of King Bunga’s theme, “Mom I Really Hate You,” as a terrific piece of bluesy alt-pop, which would not feel entirely out-of-place on an album by Mother Mother, The Orion Experience, or girl in red. But even when the music is making jokes about bad smells and bodily functions and other gross-out elements, it has a distinct feeling of being made with care by capable adults. Wish I could say the same about the NPCs or most of the random in-game events.

Conclusion:

In The Legend of Bum-Bo, winning with certain characters (and hoarding coins with them for unlocks and achievements) sometimes meant exploiting feedback loops to stall out nearly-won encounters to build up resources. ‘Breaking the game,’ which is what folks call it when finding a stat-increasing and/or item-generating recursion in a game like The Binding of Isaac, was a common approach in Bum-Bo. As was ‘breaking the game,’ which is what folks call it when a game crashes, or its unlocks don’t work . . .

Anyway, the reason I bring it up is just to highlight that the last time Edmund McMillen designed a strategy roguelike, its mechanics almost worked properly—from both a technical and a theoretical standpoint. I found it a reasonably fun experience, but the mechanics of The Legend of Bum-Bo were frequently operating within narrow limits, outside of which success could be precluded by randomness or guaranteed by tedium. Whatever lessons needed learning there, however, were manifestly learned, given the state of the strategy gameplay in Mewgenics. Or maybe it’s Glaiel’s design work that we should be praising here.

Either way, Mewgenics manages to avoid feeling hampered or narrow in that way, despite the fact that it incorporates far more randomization than Bum-Bo. And it manages that feat because, where Bum-Bo’s randomness sits like an unavoidable stone slab in its central tile-arranging gameplay, Mewgenics instead disintegrates the stone into dust and sprinkles tiny pieces of randomness like seasoning over the experience. Moment-to-moment the player feels mostly in control of the concert of chaos, conducting many small decisions per minute and then coping with the consequences. And not only does it not rely on ‘breaking the game’ through tedium, it strongly curtails doing so—by making it inconvenient to focus on perfecting cats at home to the exclusion of adventuring, by punishing players for attempting to continually reset encounters, and by implementing a soft cap on total rounds via the exhaustion system (which begins unavoidably siphoning health and mana after reaching the 10th round of most fights).

For reference, Mewgenics has not climbed to the apex of the tactics genre in my mind. It can’t beat XCOM and Fire Emblem in terms of emotional investment in player characters—which XCOM achieves through the ability to name and customize units, Fire Emblem achieves through the backstories and personalities crafted for each unit, and both achieve through being designed around taking units on as many missions as they can survive. Nor can it beat Into the Breach and Advance Wars in terms of tactical clarity—with both being distillations of strategy gameplay so pure that they often feel as much like puzzles as battles.

But none of those magnificent games have quite the dynamism, the mechanical diversity and variety, of Mewgenics; so if, as I suspect it will, it leans into that strength with future expansions while tightening up some of its existing weaknesses, it could in fact end up competing with such tactics titans.

Like Silksong in the prior year, we are once again spoiled by a long-awaited indie release that turns out to be a gargantuan, deep, satisfying masterwork from a small crew of visionaries. My criticisms of it, though noteworthy, are limited to specific aspects of its UI and presentation and writing. My praise for it is outweighing, born from the depth and breadth of its strategy gameplay, the virtuosic brilliance of its soundtrack, and the incredible amount of invention and creativity crammed into it. It is as good a game for its genre as Super Meat Boy and The End is Nigh are for theirs, and nearly as good a game for its genre as the Repentance version of The Binding of Isaac is for its. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must return to herding my cats.