Mewgenics Review: The Best Roguelite of the Decade Has Cats

Score: 9/10

Mewgenics is the kind of game that makes you cancel plans. Not once. Repeatedly, over the course of weeks, because you need to see what happens when you breed a necromancer cat with a fire mage cat and send their kitten into a dungeon full of mutant trash pandas.

Edmund McMillen and Tyler Glaiel have spent the better part of 14 years building this thing. It shows in every system, every interaction, every absurd combo the game throws at you. This is the deepest roguelite since The Binding of Isaac, and it might be the deepest tactics game since XCOM.

The Pitch

You breed cats. You equip them with collars that assign one of 14 classes. You send squads of four into procedurally generated tactical adventures on isometric grids. Survivors retire when they come home. Their kittens inherit abilities and genetic traits from both parents. You breed the next generation and do it all again.

That loop sounds simple. It is not.

Breeding Is the Game

The genetics system borrows from real biology. Every body part and color on a cat has two gene slots, one from each parent. Dominant traits show if even one copy is present. Recessive traits only appear when both parents pass them down. You are playing Punnett squares with murder cats.

Your house has rooms with stats that affect breeding outcomes. Comfort makes cats breed more often. Stimulation causes kittens to inherit the higher stat from each parent. Mutation increases the chance of new traits appearing. Furniture and fixtures boost these stats, turning your home into a eugenics lab with scratching posts.

Retired cats cannot go on adventures again. But they still breed at home and can be donated to NPCs who unlock new upgrades, rooms, and game features. Nothing is wasted. Every cat has purpose, even the ugly inbred ones with terrible stats.

Combat That Rewards Creativity

Turn based combat on procedural grids is the other half of the equation. Each cat gets one move per turn. Positioning matters enormously. Bad placement means wasted actions or free hits for enemies that shove, pull, debuff, and manipulate the battlefield.

There are over 1,000 unique abilities spread across those 14 classes. Each class has 50 active abilities and 25 passive ones. The combinations are ridiculous. PC Gamer’s reviewer described combining plastic bottles with an incontinent cat to create an endless source of free healing water. That is the kind of game this is.

Weather affects abilities. Foliage provides cover. Hazards can be turned against enemies. The tactical layer is genuinely deep. This is not a game where you mash through fights to get back to breeding. The fights are where the breeding pays off.

A Campaign That Never Ends

The main campaign spans three acts, each with branching paths. After completing a specific quest, you unlock time travel branches that add Ice Age, Jurassic, and far future zones. McMillen estimates 200+ hours to complete the main story and 500+ hours to reach 100% completion. After weeks of play, the game was still surfacing new enemies, abilities, items, and entire zones we had never seen.

The numbers back this up. Over 900 items, 200+ enemies and bosses, and 60+ soundtrack tracks by Ridiculon that PC Gamer was still discovering after 115 hours. McMillen has said the game has roughly the same amount of content as Isaac: Rebirth, Afterbirth, and Afterbirth+ combined.

The game also has its own version of Mr. Resetti. If you try to save scum, a character appears and curses your cats. Fair warning.

What Does Not Work

The RNG can be cruel. Some runs are legitimately unwinnable because the game hands you pacifist cats who refuse to fight, or abilities with 30% hit rates that miss five times in a row. GamesRadar noted that “occasionally harsh RNG can be a buzzkill.” This is not a flaw for everyone. McMillen’s games have always leaned into chaos. But if you need every run to feel fair and balanced, Mewgenics will frustrate you.

The humor is aggressively juvenile. Fecal jokes, sex jokes, bodily fluids everywhere. McMillen’s sense of humor has not changed since Super Meat Boy, and some players will find it exhausting. The Guardian called the game “compelling and impressively tasteless.” That is accurate.

Controller support works but feels like an afterthought. The game was designed for mouse input, and managing four cats across a tactical grid with a gamepad is clunky. Steam Deck runs the game fine at 60fps, but the UI navigation struggles with the complexity.

The onboarding could be better. New players face a wall of systems with limited tutorial guidance. The breeding mechanics in particular are opaque until you donate enough kittens to an NPC named Tink, who gradually unlocks visual aids for the genetics UI. Expect to spend a few hours confused before things click.

The Bottom Line

Mewgenics sits at 89 on Metacritic from 47 reviews, with 92% Very Positive on Steam from over 16,000 reviews. Those numbers are earned. This is a game with genuine strategic depth hiding behind a layer of cartoon cats and toilet humor.

The breeding system creates emergent stories no other game can match. Your favorite cat will retire. Her kitten will inherit her best trait and his father’s worst one. You will send that kitten into battle knowing the odds are bad, and you will care about the outcome more than you expected.

If you have ever enjoyed a roguelite, a tactics game, or a game with addictive reward loops, Mewgenics deserves your time. It is the most ambitious indie game of 2026 so far, and one of the best roguelites ever made.

Mewgenics is available now on Steam for $29.99 (10% launch discount until February 24). Console ports have been announced but do not have release dates yet.

For the full launch story, read how Mewgenics hit number one on Steam after 14 years. And for a look at the mind behind the game, check out what every indie dev can learn from Edmund McMillen.