A good friend once introduced me to The Binding of Isaac. I started off watching him stream it on Twitch before eventually taking the plunge myself and disappearing into the horrors beneath Mum’s house. It was grotesque, chaotic, clever, and completely unlike anything else I had played at the time. So when I found out Edmund McMillen was making another roguelike, this time with cats and turn-based combat that looked like XCOM had licked a battery and gone feral, I already had a feeling this was going to be my sort of thing.
What I was not prepared for was quite how hard Mewgenics would sink its claws into me.
Cats, chaos, and a gameplay loop that ruins your free time
At its core, Mewgenics is actually very easy to explain. You arrive in town, get handed two cats, send them off on an adventure, come home, end the day, and slowly build up your weird little feline dynasty. Strays can turn up. Cats can mate. Kittens are born. Your household grows. Once you have enough bodies to throw at a problem, off you go again.
Simple enough.
Except it does not stay simple for long.
Soon you are assigning collars to give cats specific classes, weighing up which ones are worth risking in the next act, and deciding whether a survivor is more valuable as a future parent and home defender, or a gift for one of Boon County’s many oddballs. One bloke wants kittens. One wants the weird genetic disasters. One is perfectly happy taking your dead cats off your hands. Lovely town, really.
And then there are the adventures themselves. Battles, bosses, shops, random events, environmental nonsense, strange items, stat boosts, stat penalties, weird discoveries, horrible surprises. Each run keeps throwing new twists at you, and the deeper you get, the more the game reveals just how much is going on under the hood.
The synergies are absolutely disgusting
If you have played The Binding of Isaac, you will already know the thrill of a run suddenly turning filthy because a few items happen to line up in just the right way. Mewgenics taps into that exact same buzz, only here it feels even more unhinged because it is not just items doing the work.
It is items, classes, drafted abilities, genetics, team composition, positioning, environmental interactions, and whatever fresh hell the game has decided to throw at you that day.
One run can leave you feeling like an actual genius. I had a Cleric with an upgraded healing aura applying health regeneration across the whole party with uncapped HP, which already felt broken enough. But then I also had a Tinkerer with a little robot vacuum that kept collecting whatever was on the floor and feeding more value back into the group. The whole team just kept healing. Constantly. I beat the Throbbing King and genuinely felt untouchable.
Then I lost one of my cats almost immediately after because I chose to inspect his dying remains instead of leaving well enough alone.
That is Mewgenics. It lets you feel like a god, then immediately reminds you that you are still very much playing by its rules.
It punishes greed, stupidity, and anyone trying to be clever
That is one of the things I love most about it. Mewgenics is not interested in protecting you from yourself. It actively enjoys watching you make a bad choice and then living with it.
And that goes beyond the usual roguelike cruelty. One of the smartest things in the whole game is the way it handles players trying to wriggle out of consequences. If you try quitting during a battle to avoid losing a cat or to undo a disaster, the game knows. It absolutely knows.
Rather than just quietly letting you reload and pretend none of it happened, Mewgenics introduces Steven, who essentially acts like the game’s unhinged anti-cheat goblin. You can get away with it once, but if you keep trying it, the punishments ramp up, and eventually, Steven can start interfering directly with the fight itself. It is petty, inventive, and honestly one of my favourite mechanics in the whole thing because it feels so perfectly in tune with the game’s personality.
I cannot think of many games that would respond to save scumming by turning it into a feature, let alone one that feels this nasty and this funny at the same time.
The legacy side of it is where the obsession really kicks in
The real hook is that your cats are not just units for one run and then forgotten about. The ones who come home carry the story forward. They breed. They pass on traits. They hand over useful abilities. Sometimes they pass on absolute garbage as well. You might get brilliant inherited perks that turn future kittens into little monsters, or you might end up dealing with all sorts of genetic nonsense that makes life harder like suffering from depression or ADHD.
And even when a cat is retired from adventuring, it is still part of the machine. It can help defend the home. It can be handed off to townsfolk in exchange for upgrades, new rooms, better shop options, and other long-term rewards like items for completing side quests. It all feeds back into itself so well that even when you are not out fighting, you still feel like you are pushing something forward.
That is why it is so hard to stop playing. You are never just doing one battle. Mewgenics has you building bloodlines, chasing unlocks, managing the house, making horrible decisions, and slowly shaping the future of your strange little cat empire.
It can be fiddly, but never dull
That does not mean Mewgenics is flawless.
On Steam Deck, I found the battles themselves worked well enough, but some of the house management side could be a bit fiddly on the smaller screen. Spotting mess on the floor is not always ideal, and designing the house is nowhere near as comfortable there as it would be on a larger display.
But that is the sort of complaint I make because I have to come up for air and say something slightly balanced. The truth is, even when Mewgenics frustrates, it does it in a way that makes me want another go. Even when it bends you over and punishes you for daring to feel confident, there is something in that frustration that keeps pulling you back.
It is not frustrating because it is sloppy. It is frustrating because it is committed.
Is Mewgenics worth your time?
Mewgenics is one of those games that keeps finding new ways to surprise you, punish you, reward you, and completely derail whatever neat little plan you thought you had. It looks simple when you describe the loop out loud, but actually playing it is another story entirely. There is so much variety, so much depth, and so much room for things to either come together beautifully or collapse in a screaming heap.
I am nearly 70 hours into Mewgenics and nowhere near done with it. Not even close. At this point, I would be amazed if my own journey with it ends anywhere near the lower end of what “completion” is supposed to look like.
This thing is a beast.
It is also a masterpiece. A proper indie gem. The kind of game that reminds you why indie developers can still run circles around bigger studios when they have a great idea and the guts to make it as weird as they want. Mewgenics is clever, cruel, hilarious, dense, rewarding, and completely absorbing.
Released for Windows on 10 February 2026, Mewgenics is a single-player mix of tactics, RPG, simulation and strategy from Edmund McMillen and Tyler Glaiel. You can buy it now on Steam, or wait for it to come back in stock on Loaded.com. Want to check out what we’ve got to say on other indie games we’ve played? Head over to our game reviews page.
