Claw and Order - Mewgenics Review

Mewgenics is a tactical turn-based roguelike in which a mad professor tasks you with breeding cats and then sending them into battle against everything from flies to fetuses, in sewers, deserts and more.

Don’t worry, you aren’t having a stroke, and you are reading that correctly. Let me explain.

Feline Good

Mewgenics is the new, long-awaited game from Edmund McMillen, the mind behind Super Meat Boy and The Binding of Isaac. It contains all the off-kilter, otherworldly strangeness that fans of those titles will, and indeed should, expect.

Upon starting the game, you meet Dr. Beanies, who presents you with three randomly generated cats and instructs you to pick your two favourites. The chosen two will be bred to expand your collection. The third is immediately executed. So now you should have some idea of the tone.

Once you’ve been walked through the ins and outs of breeding (no pun intended), it’s time to get stuck into the game proper. Like The Binding of Isaac, you begin with base stats and abilities that gradually evolve as you carve ever deeper into the game’s Lovecraftian world. Unlike TBoI, however, Mewgenics is turn-based, meaning every move demands careful consideration. Positioning, status effects, and ability synergies stack and intersect as you guide your party of four felines across grid-based battlefields.

As such, your victories aren’t down to your reflexes, but foresight - knowing when to push forward, when to sacrifice a turn to set up a combo, and when to accept that one of your genetically questionable chimeras might not make it out alive. In this way, the systems slowly reveal themselves, rewarding deliberate experimentation while leaving space for the kind of accidental discoveries that are often far more entertaining.

For example, an early gameplay highlight came during a boss fight with Fenrir, an eyepatch-wearing cat who, after having torn through three-quarters of my team, accidentally set an adjacent bush – and subsequently himself - on fire. From there, he proceeded to dash between items of foliage, repeatedly setting himself alight until the problem solved itself. Not exactly a hard-won victory but we take those.

Tutorialization is a topic that often gets brought up when we talk about games. When is it too much? When isn’t it enough? I’m hard-pressed to think of a game in recent memory that has done it better than Mewgenics. It gets in, gets out, and, crucially, trusts the player to carry that understanding forward and apply it under increasing duress. The result is a learning curve that feels demanding but rarely unfair.

Fur-midable Foes

That’s not to say the game doesn’t put up a fight. In fact, Mewgenics sits comfortably alongside other entries in McMillen’s catalogue in that regard. You’re routinely pitted against enemies that are as grotesque as they are dangerous, and each newly telegraphed attack brings a flicker of genuine panic as one wrong move can mean your gang of tetchy tabbies is wiped from the board entirely.

And what a gang they can become. One of the issues I often have with roguelikes is how easily party members blur together through disposable builds in an endless cycle of runs. Here, though, I found myself unexpectedly attached. Through careful breeding, incremental upgrades, and the simple absurdity of their existence, these cats begin to feel less like units and more like individuals to the point that losing one genuinely stings.

This is due in no small part to the game’s signature style, brought grotesquely to life by artist Tyler Glaiel. McMillen and Glaiel’s collaboration gives Mewgenics a distinctly warped, handmade feel, like a playable Adult Swim cartoon or a particularly unhinged Newgrounds animation from the early 2000s, with all irreverence and upstart confidence therein.

The result is a presentation that feels bespoke in a way few roguelikes manage, and it even extends to the startup screen. Each time you boot the game up, you’re treated to one of more than 200 variations of its opening intro sequence, not unlike the couch gags from The Simpsons. It’s a small touch, but it sharpens the game’s personality and elegantly feeds into the genre’s “just one more run” compulsion.

Face the Meowsic

This also extends to the game’s audio design, with your randomly generated cast of cat-rachters each producing a unique mix of purrs and yowls, some high-pitched and falsetto, others hilariously bassy, reinforcing their individuality and forcing you to feel responsible for them in a genuinely surprising way.

One element that deserves particular praise is the soundtrack. I won’t give any major spoilers here, but I was instantly hooked as early encounters leaned heavily into a smoky, jazz club vibe, all brushed drums and wandering basslines, as though your genetically dubious felines are scrapping it out in the corner of some dimly lit basement bar.

That restraint makes what happens next all the more effective. When a boss appears, a headliner takes the stage. Full lyricised tracks drop in, swelling with that unique humour and cutting clean through the smoky haze. As an appetiser, I did particularly enjoy this early track which took me instantly offguard and served to make my first boss fight all the more memorable.

It’s a clever bit of audio design. The jazzy minimalism of standard battles lulls you into a measured rhythm, while the vocal-driven boss themes heighten the drama before the fight has even begun. In a genre where soundtracks often fade into procedural background noise, Mewgenics uses music as punctuation, and so did I as I hummed some of the standout tracks in my day-to-day.

Final Purr-dict

Mewgenics is, in many ways, exactly what you would expect from the mind behind The Binding of Isaac, grotesque and gleefully unconcerned with good taste. But beneath the shock value and feline eugenics lies a surprisingly thoughtful tactical roguelike. Its breeding mechanics encourage experimentation, its turn-based combat rewards patience over panic, and its presentation gives it a personality few games in the genre can match. I’ve not even touched on the unique NPCs you’ll come to love – and loathe – throughout the game, but they’re best experienced yourself.

It won’t be for everyone. The art style is confrontational, the humour macabre, and permadeath still stings. Yet for those willing to embrace its particular brand of chaos, there’s a deeply considered strategy game lurking beneath the fur and the flames.

More than anything, Mewgenics feels confident. Confident in its systems, confident in its tone, and confident enough to trust players to meet it on its own strange terms. And somehow, against all odds, it works.

And to think, I’m not even a cat person.