A Detailed Review of Like 8% of Mewgenics
Indie games doing what indie games do best.
For a change, I wanted to write about a game while it was actually still hot. So let’s talk Mewgenics. It’s the smash hit by Edmund McMillan and Tyler Glaiel, true indie dev royalty. It sold a million copies in a week. It’s a very interesting piece of work.
I have 25 hours in this game and am a little way into Act 2. It’s a long title, a serious time-eater. 25 hours is how long this game takes to clear its throat. Table stakes. Still, between this and watching a bunch of streams, I think I have the shape of the thing.
As a developer, I find so much about this title fascinating. I have a lot of guesses about how it came about and why it works as well as it does. Note I have never met either of the developers. Any guess I make is, just that, a guess.
What Is Mewgenics?
It’s two parts.
First, you have a house full of feral warrior cats. You buy supplies and furniture, and breed them with each other to make them big and strong. Or hideously inbred monsters. Or both.
Then you send them out on missions, each taking 1-2 hours. Your group of cats maneuvers down a tree of encounters and fights (like Slay the Spire, Peglin, or Monster Train). They have a series of turn-based fights on a small, square grid (like Into the Breach).
Once the fights are done, the cats return to the safety of the house and make new warriors for you by having sex with their cousins.
Mewgenics has the cheery profane aesthetic one would expect from the developers of Super Meatboy, Binding of Isaac, and The End Is Night. Works for me.
Boring Review Stuff
It’s an extremely addictive game with a phenomenal amount of polish. They really went above and beyond with the soundtrack. The design is enormous, packed with a remarkable number of game elements that interact with each other in crazy ways. The game earns its money.
One of the pleasures of indie games is that every once in a while you get to experience a pure passion project, given lavish amounts of love and attention beyond anything you would expect. UFO50 was one of those. Stardew Valley. Even if you don’t like them, you have to appreciate the hustle. After spending a bunch of time in Borderlands 4, it’s like a glass of cool water in the desert.
If you’re into game design, you really need to play the game to see just how thorough the design was. They made a battle system, and then they spent years exploring every bit of possible design space. If there is a Mewgenics 2, I suspect they will struggle with coming up with enough fresh ideas in the current system. It seems totally milked.
All that quality comes from a seriously long development period, which is fascinating in itself.
I’m a Process Guy
I love trying to figure out all the little steps and compromises that go into making a work of art. This is extra interesting with Mewgenics, a game with a notoriously long development period.
I first learned about Mewgenics around when it was first announced in 2012 (!!!). There was an ad for it at a PAX Expo I attended, back when PAX felt really fresh and new. I was all “The Super Meat Boy guys are doing a game about breeding and fighting cats? Cool!” And then 10 years later I thought, “I wonder what happened to that.”
Turns out, they couldn’t get the combat system to be fun, so they set the game aside to do other things for a few years. Fair enough.
Then, while Mewgenics was in deep freeze, other indie developers expanded the design tech available an enormous amount. When the devs went back to the game, the toolkit at their disposal was much, much larger. Into the Breach gave the perfect battle framework. Slay the Spire gave the perfect mission framework. Just assemble the parts, add a fresh new meta-progression system (cat breeding) and a phenomenal amount of music and polish, ship, and get rich.
Again, this is just my guess of roughly what happened. I’ve never met any of the people involved. Maybe they independently invented all these systems on their own. I dunno. But honestly, I HOPE this is what happened, because that’s how our art form best evolves.
We All Stand on the Shoulders of Giants
Indie developers catch a lot of justified flack for making a million clones of a good idea, but they’re also great at taking the ideas they are given and making them newly fresh and exciting.
Truly new ideas are very rare, and most of them are bad. The total design space available to game designers is finite. Unimaginably huge, but still finite. Every year, it is harder to come up with something truly fresh, and most innovation sucks.
Indie devs work in established designs all the time. (You think I invented the turn-based RPG?) The fun is in using our tools to expand what we can do. When we make 1000 copies of Vampire Survivors, we’re being lame. Except, of course, for the 3 clones that are blessed by the Muses and actually feel fresh and awesome. (Brotato!)
If I sound overly cynical about innovation, bear in mind that the part of Mewgenics that works worst is the most innovative part.
The Breeding is a Problem
Breeding cats is very important, and it’s the freshest, most innovative part of the design. I hope other devs explore it. When they do, they definitely can make their fortunes by improving it.
Since the breeding is a very new system, it should be very clean and clear. Two problems.
One, it’s very opaque. The game explains very little about how it works. I had to do a bunch of Googling.
Two, the interface is really rough. I had to spend a lot of time just to figure out where cats were and which cat had what stats and what cats to get rid of. You have to play a ton of hours to get the interface you needed. I’m not even close. Then, while I’m sorting through my cats to figure out which were useful and which were junk, they all ran around and I lost my place in the list and had to start over.
And of course you’re thinking, “Well that’s what cats are like lol lmao!” Yeah. I know. No offense to cat people, but that’s why I own a dog. It just feels to me like an interface that’s underbaked. Surprising, when everything else in this game is polished to such a fine sheen.
(As I write this, a patch with interface improvements just came out. I don’t think I’ve actually earned the features it improves yet, so maybe more serious players than me are in paradise now. I’m not sure how I feel about having to do a lot of grinding just to unlock the interface.)
Still like the game, but God is in the details.
Side Thought About Pets
The success of Mewgenics says a lot about humanity’s odd love-hate relationship with cats. Look at it this way … If this game was about dogs, it would have to be a very different game.
My Future With Mewgenics
As I said, I’m 25 hours in, which is enough to barely get started. I’ll play it a bunch more, but I don’t think I can finish it. Personally, when I finish a huge game like this, it’s usually a depression symptom.
I’m increasingly mentally dividing games between Time-Eaters and Busy-Person-Games. (Need a better term.) Some games sell a sponge that absorbs huge amounts of excess time. Other games sell a focused experience for people with busy lives. Mewgenics is very, very much the former. A valid audience. I’m just not part of it.
Also, it’s so thrilling that it’s an actual new IP. At the moment, the big excitement in AAA games is figuring out exactly what Bungie did with the exhumed, dusty corpse of Marathon, so I’m very happy to have the cat option.
This is another case where a small team of indie developers came up with a cool game that blows everyone away while the big companies are wandering aimless. Always brings a tear to my eye.
And as for me? I got really addicted to Mewgenics for a week. Then life got busy, and I was completely unable to meet its demands for a week. Now that life is calm, I could start playing it again, but doing so gives me a queasy feeling. I no longer live a life that can fit a game like this.
So I must bid Mewgenics a happy, grateful farewell and put it on my Masterpieces For Other People shelf next to Silksong. (And probably Slay the Spire 2 soon lol.) Maybe I’ll go back to Space Invaders. A game of that is 3 minutes, max. As my dad always said, it’s hell gettin’ old.
Spiderweb Software has been creating turn-based, indie, old-school fantasy role-playing games since 1994. They are low-budget, but they’re full of good stories and fun.
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Thanks for the nice commentary (yet again). I look forward to playing Mewgenics someday. It seems many games sit on the "Good, but not for me" shelf these days (which is ever shifting - it's not of this world).
What of (competent and fun) "3 minute sessions" that are a part of a (competent, fun and satisfying) "long term" whole? How many of these umbrellas exist?
Tangent 1:
I've found that (it only took decades) I enjoy "meta" gaming (a very large and amorphous umbrella). That is to type, games with core repeatable (in whatever fashion) loops that have things to build upon outside of said loop(s). Vague enough? For example, a game featuring "extraction" game play that also allows the player to build a base, which can impact the loop... but perhaps other options that, while they may not impact the "loop", satisfy the player (e.g., cosmetics, which can do both).
Tangent 2:
I've been sitting on a handful of mutating ideas for the aforementioned decades (which don't make for a comfortable cushion). Now I just need about a decade and a group of pro bono talented artists and free room and board to make it real. Oh, and hope there's still a market for it in the future (to make a return on that time and mythical free everything). Ain't that the rub?
Tangent 3:
Inspired, perhaps, by the Asteroids reference. On a related tangent, I recently, for reasons unknown (or more suited to a psychological/human behavior forum), began playing "arcade" games again. Specifically, rhythm based games. I've found that even on the "easiest" settings, they can be challenging. My mind struggles to comprehend videos I've seen of people playing on the most difficult levels. However, there's a satisfying experience there (and/or neurotransmitter experiences that are addicting).
Tangent 4:
Asteroids. Space Invaders. Pac-Man. Berserk. Donkey Kong. Breakout. Dozens (potentially hundreds) of others. So many quarters spent. Nice memories.
Mewgenics is good but yes, it absolutely is a lot. Runs are pretty long by roguelite standards, cat management is complicated, and picking which cats to send with which classes and which gear is a solid recipe for choice paralysis. I'm absolutely going to keep playing because, again, very good, but it's enough thinking that I have to take breaks from it.
I expected it to be good (albeit gross) given Edmund's past work but the soundtrack really is the surprise highlight for me. I mean, Ridiculon made solid music for Binding of Isaac, but that's "solid to listen to as background for a game", while for Mewgenics they've made a soundtrack I've bought and will play regularly from now on. The vocals coming in as you get to bosses works very well.