Mewgenics: A Delightfully Weird Game

A house full of cats sits on a hill in Boon County. Night has arrived, but the party has not. Each feline holds their breath, waiting for a sign that they lived.

Soon, one cat spots something in the distance. A figure appears! All the cats cheer, at first, but no one else follows the figure. As they approach, one cat recognizes them: Abednego, the hunter that joined The Husky Furballs on their trek to the desert.

One of the retired cats slowly approaches Abednego. Mainly to help him carry the loot he brought back, but also to ask the question on everyone's mind. "What happened out there?"

The green, patterned cat looks them dead in the eyes, and in his deep voice, he grants the only answer they'll ever get:

"The beast that was in the crater had its last gourmet meal. I made sure of it."

Have you ever heard of Edmund McMillen?

As a kid, I had always heard that he was one of the godfathers of indie gaming, or something along those lines. It's like he himself planted the indie seed into the gaming field, and carefully tended to it so that it would become what it is today. Personally, his most notable games to me (excluding the game mentioned in the title of this post) are The Binding of Isaac, and Super Meat Boy.

Super Meat Boy is a difficult platformer, where you're tasked with getting Meat Boy to his girlfriend, Bandage Girl. She has been kidnapped by Dr. Fetus (no, I'm not kidding), who keeps snatching her away from you.

The Binding of Isaac is a bullet-hell roguelike (though it's more accurate to say Roguelite, but that's being pedantic), where you guide Isaac or any of the other characters through a demented basement hatch, in order to prevent his mom from sacrificing him in the name of her lord God. Along the way, you find items and pickups that allows for many combinations, and lots of synergies between them.

He has made more games, though, and they're nothing to scoff at either. Time Fcuk is a puzzle game, Aether is about exploring small planets in space, Coil is... a somber experience, Spewer involves messing with certain liquids, and Triachnid is a physics-based spider adventure. The examples in this paragraph, alongside some other games, are conveniently bundled up in a game you can buy on Steam: The Basement Collection.

And there's still more games he's made. He's been at this for a long time, and it shows. Thankfully, he also has very creative ideas that he continues to pull from within his own psyche. Yes, his games have all sorts of strange and deranged and straight-up dark and disgusting themes, but while they usually are there to make you laugh, he doesn't sugarcoat them either. That, in and of itself, takes a lot of talent. Either that, or it shows that there are a lot of freaks out there that can take in this kind of content without getting real disgusted (like myself).

So when his latest game released about a month ago this year, I was excited to see what was in store! When the Steam Spring Sale hit, I got the game.

Mewgenics is a game with two phases. You first have the breeding section, where you manage a house full of cats. Then, you have the adventuring section, where up to four cats can be sent out to explore the land (on a map that reminds one of Slay the Spire), bringing back coins, food, and whatever items you manage to scavenge. Along the way, you get into fights, which is represented as a turn-based strategy game (kind of like X-Com, if anyone reading this knows of that game).

Essentially, you're trying to breed the ultimate killing machine.

Adventuring

At the point where I've gotten, I have access to Act 2, out of 3. The acts are basically choosing where you want to adventure, and where that adventure will inevitably end up. Act 1 starts in the Alley, with two paths at the end: you can either head into the Sewers that lead to the Cave, or go through the Junkyard that ends at the Boneyard (read: cemetery). Act 2 has you start in the desert. I won't mention more than that; mainly because I have yet to fully traverse through all of the areas of Act 2.

Each area, naturally, has its own theming. The Alley is a pretty basic area filled with weak flies, maggots, and rats, with the occasional cat. Sewers have living shit, leeches, poisonous enemies, exploding enemies, and somehow sharks, that reside in water that constantly gets shifted around. The Junkyard has some sort of damaging liquid and lots of broken glass scattered around the place, with enemies that either inflict poison, spread creep, or cause you to bleed. Things like that. There's a "weather" system that also dictates what is happening in that area. Sometimes birds become more common, or maybe some dumbass started a fire that persists throughout the alleys. I think Act 2, from what I've experienced, has had areas that force more unique weather effects on you. The Desert, for example, has a very harsh sun that reduces any healing by 1 (unless you're wet), and doesn't net you any heals after a battle ends. While I don't like the feeling of managing my health through that torture, it's actually a clever mechanic to represent how it feels to go through a desert. You have to ration shit in order to make the trek.

Beginning a trek is also pretty cool. You have collars that essentially provide your cats Classes. You start out with four of them, but you gain more types as you reach further areas. The initial four are the Fighter (strong kitty), Ranger (a cat that hangs back and shoots from afar), Mage (cats with mainly magic attacks), and the Tank (takes hits for the team). Alternatively, you can choose not to give collars to cats, making them collarless (read: classless), so I guess there's five "classes" at the beginning.

One more thing about the expeditions: I love the music. It's adaptive music (or as TV Tropes calls it, a Variable Mix), and the way they did it is so cool. There are four variants of the theme for each area.

They are:

• The map theme, which is calm and catchy.
• The event theme, which happens whenever an event happens, or you're in a shop - it's not as calm, yet somehow becomes a more laid-back version of the theme.
• The battle theme, where the song really catches on, and you start to hear the main melody a lot clearer at this point.
• Last, but not the least, is the boss theme. It uses a boss intro sound (unique to each area) that allows the song to reset naturally, and the purpose for doing this is because the boss themes HAVE LYRICS!

Yes, each area has lyrics, and they only proc up when you are fighting the boss. It's such a blast.

Some of them can even get unlocked on the house radio in the breeding portion of the game. Speaking of, let's talk about that.

Breeding

The other important half of the game. You start out in a one-room house, with some furniture and some cats. Each day, a stray cat comes by with random stats and appearances and whatnot, and you can choose to take them in, or send them in the pipe and trash them.

The pipe in question is also part of a huge piping system around Boon County, connecting to all the NPC's that you can interact with. These NPC's occasionally have important stuff to tell you, and usually have tips at hand for whatever system they help you out with. Every NPC eventually will request some cats from you, usually with specific requirements. Tink (real name) will ask for some kittens, and in turn he will help provide you with tools for more effective breeding (so that you don't end up with inbred kittens). Butch (real name - maybe related to Tink) will take cats that have travelled to further and further areas each set he requests, and in turn will provide you with more storage for the items you find on your journeys. Unrelated, but he is also the one that gives you the class collars whenever you unlock them, and his tips are useful for adventuring. Frank wants cats that are just retired (i.e. completed an adventure), nothing more and nothing less. He pays you back by building new rooms to your house. There are more examples, but you get my point.

Each room in the house has four stats applied to it: Comfort (how often they breed or fight; higher numbers inspire breeding, while lower numbers inspire fighting), Stimulation (how often a newborn kitten will have the stats, skills, and passives of their parents), Health (how often they can either get cured from or gain diseases), and Mutation (how often a cat will gain a mutation).

The house as a whole also has an Appeal stat, which influences the quality of the stray cat that appears every day.

When you end the day, each cat eats one unit of food you have, and then the game will show you the significant things that happened that night. Usually this is either breeding, fighting (and the outcome), mutations, changes in health, or cats that become old. It can even show you which cat didn't get any food (not that I lacked food; I just forgot to bring one of my adventuring cats back into the house - yes, it's the named cat at the beginning of this post).

It's a pretty deep system. You try to rearrange existing furniture (and buy new ones) to influence the stats of the house so that you get better results for breeding and such.

Sometimes, there are house bosses. They seem to have a trigger, since my first one was triggered by finishing Act 1. You can send any cat to fight it, but it's recommended you get your retired cats to fight (since they have experience with fighting, and have more skills to fight with). If a retired cat survives the fight, they become super mega ultra retired, basically meaning they will no longer do any fighting period (in terms of gameplay - they might still kill a cat if they decide to fight one of your own).

You have to find a balance between getting well-bred cats from the ones you already have, and then sending bad results to those that want it, alongside the older retired ones to those who want it too, as long as you got what you can out of them. It really is just eugenics, so good pick for a name, Tyler.

Final Thoughts

Mewgenics is a really fun roguelike, which was practically guaranteed due to Edmund's skill at making fun roguelikes. The entire team did a good job with everything here: adorable graphics (even for things that aren't so adorable), sick music (as in it rocks), and deep gameplay that I enjoy pondering.

If you are okay with the kinds of topics an Edmund McMillen game, I highly suggest you get the game.