Video Game / Mewgenics

"Level up your team as you venture further and further from your home, collect unique items, defeat epic bosses, gain mutations and return home so you you can breed and further your bloodline, in this turn based legacy roguelike draft sim about cats!"

Mewgenics is a planned-for-2025 Roguelike slash Raising Sim slash Turn-Based Tactics slash Musical game by Edmund McMillen.

The game is divided between a home for the player to raise and breed their cats, and "Adventures" where the player's cats are sent to forage for cat food along with armor, weapons and genetic mutations and bring them back to base.

As the game is yet to be released, this page will be based on promotional material and development updates published by the developers, which can be seen in the game's steam page.

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Mewgenics contains examples of:

• Absurdly High Level Cap: A single cat (the one with the lowest level, or a random one in the event of a tie) levels up once whenever a fight is won. Normally, that's eighteen level-ups, six per chapter, putting a party that survives an adventure at two level 5 cats and two level 6 cats. However, taking the Path of Most Resistance yields one more (far harder) fight and level-up, and having less than four cats means they'll reach higher levels, meaning a theoretical maximum of level 21. Unlike most examples of sky-high level caps, leveling that much actually gives meaningful bonuses to make the effort to get them worthwhile.
• After the End: Many aspects of the Boon County area point towards it being in the aftermath of a nuclear explosion or a similar disaster: most of the town is in ruins, most creatures you find are very bizarre, and Dr. Beanies often mentions wanting to rebuild the world.
• Attack Failure Chance: Attacks are normally of the always accurate type, but the attack is given a chance to miss its target if it is hiding in tall grass. However, the grass tile itself isn't capable of dodging, so if you set the grass your target is on ablaze...
• Ax-Crazy: Those furballs aren't exactly shying away from mass murdering strays for profit. But if a cat gets infected with rabies, it gets worse: their basic attack is replaced by melee, and they lose one int and gain one str after each combat. Lose all int and not only will your cat fail to regenerate mana, it will also stop taking commands and only do what he wants to do- and all he wants to do is kill whatever's nearest.
• Batter Up!: One of the equippable items you may give to your cats is a baseball bat. It launches whoever's hit by it.
• Big Ball of Violence: When the night comes, two cats might jump into one of these and come out either dead or injured.
• Black Comedy: You don't say! As seen in the sixth pre-release blog post, having your cats get birth defects as a result of inbreeding or rabies after failing to loot a dead cat's corpse are fleshed-out game mechanics!
• Bullied into Depression: One of the ways to get a mental disorder is "being mocked by your team for failing a basic task" and one of said mental disorders is depression, making this a possible scenario.
• Central Theme: Legacy. While you do get some cats given to you for free, most of your cats will be the children of former characters. And this aspect doesn't only cover family cat trees: legendary, one-of-a-kind artifacts may be found in adventures.They can be stored away in your home, but they can be also be brought in adventures to provide substantial bonuses, running the risk of losing them. Permanently.
• Company Cross References:
  • One Mook you can throw down with is Cereus Peashy, the star of a little-known flash platformer also made by Edmund.
  • Stacy, the cat with a prominent, sentient brain tumor repeatedly featured in promotional material is quite similar to Steven.
• Creepy Souvenir: Hunters can skin fallen enemies, which earns them an animal pelt. Which they immediately wear and gain the bonuses from. They get an even bigger bonus if they wear all three types of pelt at once. Said bonus involves spawning in allied fleas.
• Crippling Castration: One of the permanent injuries your cats can suffer after being downed in combat is having their nuts ripped clean off. This renders them unable to reproduce.
• Damage-Increasing Debuff: Bruise gives a flat increase to damage taken equal to the amount of Bruise, and it comes pre-packaged with some physical disorders like Charred.
• Damage Discrimination: Completely absent. Your cats can hurt or even kill each other with ease, and your enemies can be manipulated into doing the same with some effort; there are even certain skills that encourage attacking your own cats, such as the fighter's Hit Me.
• Deliberately Monochrome: The game's coloring is noticeably bled-out, with most things that aren't your own cats being somewhere between cement gray and dry dirt brown. This is part of an attempt at an Inkblot Cartoon Style, together with a constant film grain filter and a soundtrack ripped straight out of the 30's.
• Dying Town: It's not stated directly anywhere, but you meet relatively few people in the dirty, trash-covered Boon County. It's gotten to the point that there are more cats than people in the town (the explosions probably helped)—which is great news for the local illegal cat fighting ring.
• Dynamic Difficulty: The "Troll Engine" will throw curve balls at you if your run is going well, and ease up if you're getting pummelled. The tweet that teased this also mentions that it was erroneously counting cat injuries as a good thing and subsequently "rewarding" the battered cats with a negative event.
• The Eeyore: Goes without saying that a cat with Depression is this, so much so that they suffer reductions to all stats- a downside shared to anybody next to them; misery loves company!
• Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors: Jesus Christ. Here's just a small snippet of what elemental mages can do: Surf is cast upon short grass, watering it and growing it into the evasion-boosting long grass. The grass is then frozen, turning it into shards of ice that damage anything that walks over that tile. Then, a fire spell melts the ice and leaves behind a puddle of movement-hindering water, which is then frozen to create Frictionless Ice. Grass is also really flammable, letting you coat a large part of the field in fire.
• Elite Mooks: Exclusive to the Path of Most Resistance are Champion variants of common enemies. Champions are larger, have an unique and far more threatening appearance, and have better stats, double health, hit harder, move farther, and take an extra turn every round. Sure, a champion Pinky isn't going to be much more trouble, but later on you'll get horrifying beasts with Area of Effect One-Hit Kill moves.
• Evolutionary Pressure Cooker: When a fight breaks out between two of your cats inside the house and there is a decisive victory, the winner will get stronger off its enemy's blood. Repeat this enough times and your furry gladiator will become incredibly strong.
• Evolving Attack: The Obsidian Shard gets sharper with every slash in exchange for having a mere five uses. The Soul Claw is similar, but it also gains more uses after killing an enemy.
• Express Delivery: Gestation in Mewgenics takes about a second from conception to birth- almost as long as the sex before it.
• Fantasy Cat Classes: Described in the third pre-release blog post are the Fighter, Mage, Cleric, Tank, Thief and Hunter, along with "Collarless" cats who haven't had a class assigned to them yet.
• Fartillery: The Fartoom! ability propels the user high into the air, and also knocks nearby enemies far away, making it very useful if your cat is surrounded.
• Gay Option: Each cat has two hidden stats that determine how much they like sex, and whether they prefer same- or opposite-sex relations.^note To be more specific, every cat has a "horniness" stat that increases their chances to get it on the larger it is, with the actual direction of said attraction being determined by the gayness stat: the higher it is, the gayer your cat is. One of those is far more useful to you, and you can weight the chance of it happening by choosing which two cats to leave in a room together.
  Suki♀ got it on with Katniss♀...
  but no kitten was made.
• Hello, [Insert Name Here]: You actually don't get to insert a name for your cats manually most of the time, but abilities use their names in their descriptions.
• Hub Level: Your house is where you can breed cats by paying food to pass the days, fiddle with whatever wacky/useful/radioactive furniture your cats brought home, and jam out to 99.9 WMEW.
  • ...Until a boss comes knocking to demand feline sacrifice, that is. Should you instead decide to fight them off, your aged former adventurers will be the ones to battle.
• Incest Is Relative: In a perhaps surprising bout of realism, your cats can and will breed with their parents, children, siblings, cousins and so on. Felines don't really have the concept of an incest taboo. Where this goes above and beyond in terms of detail however, is in the outcome: The cat inbreeding simulation is scientifically accurate, as main programmer Tyler Glaiel actually read several academic papers about dog breeding before coding, resulting in a nearly lifelike depiction of cats gaining birth defects. Said birth defects often have them develop traits from completely different biological classes.
• Inexplicably Preserved Dungeon Meat: Pickups include catnip (which restores mana) and food, which restores health. None of these are unsafe to eat in spite of the fact they're sitting on the floor of a trash-filled alleyway, but at least you can cook the food with fire attacks... And also smoke the catnip that way.
• Inventory Management Puzzle: A Subverted Trope, thankfully. If you manage to fill out the 16-slot inventory screen, it will simply expand in size.
• Jekyll & Hyde: A Jekyll is a bright-eyed, positively adorable kitty enemy. Give it a few turns and they'll morph into far more powerful (and uglier) Hydes.
• Lecherous Licking: One ghost enemy has a large, reddish tongue which it uses for melee attacks. By licking your cat. Really slowly. This will sap their mana.
• LEGO Genetics: The whole premise of the game, really. The sixth and eight pre-release blog posts shed a little more light on the matter: Each cat in Mew is randomly generated by randomly choosing how the limbs, body shape, tail, head, and fur, along with two eyes, ears, eyebrows, and mouth should look, together with a random location for facial features. Most of these are (relatively) cat-like, but some mutations can give your cats things like webbed feet and ram horns. Any of these characteristics (including ones gained in life via random events) can be randomly passed on to offspring along with mental disorders and a single collarless ability, creating cats who look like their parents and possibly fight like them too.
• Lip Losses: One type of enemy is called the Glass Spitter. Where do you think their ammunition is stored?
• Mad Bomber: One boss is the Radical Rat, who wears a pair of Cool Shades and wields rat-faced Cartoon Bombs with Bomberman-style cross-shaped blasts, and hides under a trash can just before they go off. You can defuse them by paw... or detonate them sooner with fire.
• Magic Knight: Multiclassing to make a Fighter with access to spells is perfectly possible- if in a somewhat different manner than most RPGs would have you do it.
  • To wit: Meowthur the Fighter gets it on with fellow Fighter Meowne of Arc, and the resulting kitten has a higher chance to inherit passive or active Fighter skills from its parents instead of Uncollared (classless) skills. The cat child will keep these skills regardless of whether it becomes a Fighter or not- get ready to see a cleric who can clean house.
  • Mages and their offspring also have access to the Tutor passive, which teaches the last spell that Mage cast each turn to every cat on your party- That Tank casting a Frost Blast isn't very squishy, is it?
• Metal Slime: When talking about bugs: Rarely, a bird might show up in battles. Should your cats or their enemies manage to kill it before it flies away, they will be given an all-stats up and a bonus at the end of combat. If the bird gets killed by lightning (and thus doesn't have anyone to reward) it'll just turn into some fried chicken.
• Money Mauling: Thief cats may obtain the Coin Toss skill, whose effect is self-explanatory. It combos well with other Cast from Money Thief abilities such as Swift Looter which lets them move again in the same turn after collecting a coin.
• Money Spider: Enemies may drop pickups upon death, including coins.
• Mutants: A (very slighty) more realistic portrayal than most media, according to the sixth pre-release blog post. Like Real Life, mutations can occur at birth with a much higher chance should the cat in question be inbred, with a slew of effects both positive and negative, and will be passed on should the cat with it breed. However, more flashy Nuclear Mutants also happen, and the mutations in this case are far more likely to be positive.
• Night of the Living Mooks: Some enemies are undead, including animate feline skeletons, Hulking masses of rotten cat flesh, and dogs who expel some form of white liquid from their neck stumps.
• One-Hit Kill: One type of champion can simply gobble up whole cats in one very messy bite.
  • On the side of the cats there is the Shatter mage skill. If you manage to hit a frozen enemy with it they will instantly die (bosses will instead take heavy damage and thaw out) but otherwise it deals mere Scratch Damage.
• Our Sirens Are Different: Sirens are a type of Mook in a vague feline shape, with large ears and prominent lips.
• Ow, My Body Part!: Whenever a cat is downed, red text detailing the injury suffered with appear and float up from their body.
  • More humorously, a passive called My Leg! exists, which makes every suffered injury be a broken leg, then turns the sufferer into ultimate Fastball Special ammunition once all four legs are broken.
• Permadeath: The subject of the fifth pre-release blog post. If every cat in a party is downed in combat or enough time passes after a cat completes an adventure, they really die and are lost forever. However, if a cat is downed in combat, its body isn't destroyed and the party wins, it'll bounce back with a permanent stat-altering physical disorder to mark the occasion.
• Pun-Based Title: "Mew", a sound cats make, with "Eugenics." Jeez!
• Punched Across the Room: Tank cats can slam enemies back with every single attack, and the Knockback Tank archetype takes it even further, not to mention the baseball bat item which can launch any enemy to the other side of the map. Being slammed against a wall HURTS, especially if you wind up going through ice shards in the way.
• Raising Sim: The other half of the game, and the reason you're going on adventures for food in the first place. The fifth pre-release blog post goes into more detail: once your cat Mons return from an adventure, they get old, can't be taken on adventures anymore, are free to let any special genes they have be inherited, and an invisible timer starts to count down their remaining days.
• Scratch Damage Enemy: An inverted example can be found in the small rocks strewn around battlefields. They are inanimate objects that can be kicked around to launch them at targets dealing one damage to the rock itself in the process. Where this fits the trope more clearly is when a Tank's Pet Rocks leap to life and start charging enemies on their own, still taking only a single point of damage from almost any attack.
• Silly Animal Sound: All of the cats are voiced via cameos received through Twitter / X during early 2023- most of the voices are accurate impressions of meows, but some rarer ones are clearly just saying "meow" out loud, and even rarer voices might make your cats quack.
• The Six Stats: Just like The Binding of Isaac before it, Mewgenics takes heavy inspiration from Dungeons & Dragons, and this is very easy to see in the nearly identical seven stat system it has:
  • Strength: how much damage your cat will deal with their melee attacks and abilities, along with the chance of success in strength-based random events.
  • Dexterity: how much damage your cat will deal with their ranged attacks and abilities, along with the chance of success in dexterity-based random events.
  • Constitution: how much max hp your cat can have and how much they regenerate between battles, along with the chance of success in constitution-based random events (think surviving poison, or eating a huge poop)
  • Intelligence: how much mana your cat will regenerate at the end of its turn, along with the chance of success in intelligence-based random events.
  • Speed: how many tiles your cat can move on its turn as well as when it will take its turn in turn order, along with the chance of success in speed-based random events (mostly running away from stuff)
  • Charisma: Influences max mana, mana at the start of each combat, and how good your cat is in bed (and other charisma-based random events)
  • Luck: Affects the odds of anything that has odds, the money found after battle, and luck-based random events like surviving a Bolivian Army Ending.
• Speed Sex: Sex between cats is over in the blink of an eye. Yes, this is in service of gameplay convenience, but poor Molly!
• Stat Death: Certain skills can drop your cats' stats, but only diseases and disorders like rabies, which lowers Intelligence and raises Strength after each combat, persist. If a cat actually gets to zero Intelligence because of rabies, it will no longer generate Mana every turn and will no longer be controlled by you- instead trying to shred whoever's nearest to bits, be they friend or foe. Worse, this if it actually manages to down a team member in combat then rabies will spread to them, starting a chain reaction that can end with a party that autoplays itself incredibly poorly. Rabies also replaces their basic attack with a melee claw swipe or bite.
• Stealth Sequel: One Cursed Item described in the sixth pre-release blog post is the Child's Skull, which replaces your cat's attack with a very low damage, short range projectile that can be used twice a turn called a tear. Now why does that sound familiar..?
  • Other references to Mew being set after the events of The Binding Of Isaac include the Pooter enemy making a return here and a Tank passive ability called Thunder Thighs, who shares a name and similar effect to a passive item from Isaac, along with gravestones bearing Isaac's face on them.
• Super Breeding Program: Or magician breeding program, or strongcat, or...
  • In general, a huge part of the game (evidenced by its Intentionally Awkward Title) consists of very carefully choosing which cats should hump eachother to produce the most capable kittens for combat (such as a strong fighter, a wise mage, or a sexy thief)
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: From the fifth pre-release blog post, teasing the content of the sixth, which deals in the disorders you cats can obtain (and inherit):
  "but in mewgenics most of the time when something survives an adventure it's not all sunshine and rainbows.. sometimes they come back quite different, they have seen and experienced some real shit, and with that may come a smorgasbord of mental and physical disorders, parasites and even curses that could potentially haunt your family for generations!"
• Show Within a Show: Radio station within a game, rather. The music in the house Raising Sim section comes from an in-universe radio station called 99.9 WMEW, complete with bumpers featuring narration by Matthias Bossi.
• Stone Wall: The Tank class, first shown in the third pre-release blog post, gets a huge +4 bonus to constitution in exchange for -1 of both dexterity and inteligence, making it both deal less ranged damage and regenerate less mana per turn. However, Tanks also have access to damaging movement abilities such as Trample (walk right through enemies and the enviroment, dealing damage to them as you do) and Toss (Toss an adjacent thing onto someone else or an empty tile, dealing damage to both whoever was thrown and whatever they land on), along with a basic attack that dashes them forward one tile and deals one tile of Knock Back to the target.
• Stuck Items: Along with the Child's Skull, the sixth pre-release blog post goes into detail about parasites, gained by "joining a cat orgy or eating a really big poop," among other methods. Once a parasite infects a cat it takes over an item slot, giving a heavy disadvantage and a small upside.
• Squishy Wizard: Assigning a cat the Mage class will increase their inteligence but also decrease their constitution, increasing mana regeneration per turn and decreasing maximum health.
• Too Awesome to Use: Both Invoked and Exaggerated with legendary artifacts you can find in expeditions- find the Holy Grail laying around, for example, and the cat that wields it shall gain a substantial bonus, but if it dies the Grail is lost. Forever.
• Turn-Based Tactics: Think X Com Enemy Unknown, but for the Crazy Cat Lady from The Simpsons.
• Unexpectedly Realistic Gameplay: Oh, all over the place. That poop-on-command skill might be useful for blocking ranged attacks, right? Except the inertia of the blocked shot launches the poop right into the cat that shat it. Having that super-strong cat you've got breed with as many other cats as possible seems like a great idea, yeah? Except that means most of the next generation is going to be related to each other, resulting in inbreeding which in turn results in fucked-up cats with disorders and deformities. The gameplay is in fact so complex that developer Tyler Gladiel had to set up a program that does nothing but play Mewgenics hours at a time to check for edge cases and bugs.
• Unnecessary Combat Roll: The "Roll" skill has no real combat application besides letting your cats move a single space diagonally.
• Variable Mix: Each chapter of an adventure has its own unique track, with different takes crossfaded in for each submenu (combat, map, event)
• Walking Wasteland: Cats who have depression suffer a huge all-stats down due to their debilitating condition, but their low mood is so pervasive enemies next to them also get debuffed. A depressed tank makes the enemies swarming it easy prey for your faster, mentally healthier cats.
• With Friends Like These...: Sometimes, cats have more to fear from their teammates than their enemies. Even if a cat hasn't been turned into a mindless killing machine by rabies, they can also hurt them in the process of throwing them away from danger, to trigger a Critical Status Buff that activates when teammates are downed, to outright offing them on purpose to have their level-ups go to other teammates.
• Wrestler in All of Us: Cats are perfectly capable of suplexing their enemies (or allies) into rocks, lobbing them into shards of ice, or giving them shoulder checks as they pass by.