The idiosyncrasies of Flash games and their culture can be found all over Mewgenics’ DNA: there’s the simple, even childlike illustrations of cats, enemies and characters; the low-brow humor of the poop and farts variety; and the controversial nature of its very title—an obvious amalgamation of “mew” and “eugenics”. True to its name, Mewgenics is about breeding a battalion of cats at your base, and then sending eligible kitties off into the wild for rounds of combat against crudely drawn enemies, from floating pieces of excrement to battle-hardened cat sergeants. It’s also like chancing upon that rare gem in Newgrounds after ploughing through pages of weird stickman and perverse dead baby games in the early 2000s: utterly gratifying, and extremely rewarding.
Here’s the thing about Mewgenics: you can spend close to 100 hours and only scratch the game’s surface. Its core loop comprises of going on battles with your litter of cats across several zones, which includes events like picking up power-ups and artefacts, and interacting with random creatures and folks you meet along the way. Meanwhile, combat is essentially a turn-based roguelike: you can move your cats across tiles to attack enemies. Your cats are also given class collars, which imbues them with specific attacks and improved stats of an archetypal RPG class, such as a tank, fighter, cleric or thief. There’s usually a boss fight at the end of the zone too, but cats who sustain injuries, even permanent, crippling ones, usually bring these over to subsequent fights.
Meanwhile, any surviving cats can be brought back to your base at the end of their journey, where they’re retired and no longer eligible for any more adventuring. Instead, their roles have evolved; now they are meant to breed. Put them in a dark corner of your house, and hope that they get comfortable enough to get it on and procreate, creating more kitty-soldiers for you. Stray cats, too, will wander to your base, and you can adopt and introduce them to your existing litter. Once you’re ready, you can send new cats out for battle once again, with them leveling up, and bringing back food and coin to feed your growing brood.
Meow than that
What I’ve described is merely the tip of the iceberg; beneath this is an intricate management sim that also lets you trade in your cats for upgrades, from building a bigger base to house more critters, to improving the pedigree of stray cats that have made their way to your doorstep. For one, there are certain conditions to fulfill so that your cats can get in the mood for mating and produce quality offspring in your humble abode, such as comfort, appeal and stimulation. These can be improved by getting access to better furniture, which you can use to decorate your base. And once you get into the rhythm of it all, examining your cats’ attributes to make calculated decisions, such as which cats to discard, and which are suitable for breeding (here’s when the “eugenics” part of Mewgenics comes about), will become second nature. In fact, there are so much to get into that it can get overwhelming quickly, but therein comes the nearly limitless replayability of it all. Even choosing which cats to donate is a puzzle in itself, given that certain types of cats are necessary for specific upgrades. One character only wants injured cats; another prefers cats of a particular age; and there’s one particularly creepy dude who only wants kittens.
At the same time, there’s the combat segment of Mewgenics, which offer just enough variety to ensure that most fights feel unique. Your band of cat-venturers have pretty diverse abilities, even among the same class. For instance, your tank in a previous team may have a passive ability that gives it thorns, which offers it the ability to hurt anyone who would come into contact with it. On the other hand, your new tank in your current lineup may have the capacity to cat-tapult other units to a further tile, potentially hurting an enemy if your cat lands on the very same tile. Additional gear and items can also be equipped on your cats to imbue them with more inventive abilities, like allowing them to spawn parasites every turn that will fight for your cause.
Enemies, too, are wonderfully distinct, each with a mixed bag of attacks, capabilities and tactics. Some will turn towards and trample on you when you hit them, whereas others can disguise themselves as rocks or other objects. Then there’s a smattering of other factors, like differences in environments and the weather, alongside a variety of boons and elemental damage, that will make strategizing imperative, even if you’re facing the same type of enemy or boss fights again. Variations like this ensure that no two adventures are exactly the same, preventing fights from becoming stale.
These quirks do add a degree of difficulty to the game, which can translate to frequent losses. And given that Mewgenics is a roguelike, defeats can be a bitter pill to swallow; lose your entire battalion in a battle, and you lose them permanently, including the precious items you’ve accrued along the way. Your gear doesn’t last forever either, and is prone to breaking after using it for multiple adventures. But you’ll know better than to rage quit; the point is to learn from your mistakes and to try and try again. It’ll only take you a couple more hours, after all.
Cat-tastrophes aplenty
I can spend a few more paragraphs describing the ridiculously in-depth mechanics of Mewgenics, but the appeal of the game is also its unpredictability and the sense of discovery. You’ll get into the comfortable routine of battling and breeding until something shakes up this cadence: a boss fight that proves to be too difficult to overcome for now, a random encounter that introduces coals of fire into the arena, or a dumb decision to let your cat munch on a massively tantalizing poop from the corner of the street, only to see it getting poisoned instead. I can also imagine the sickos among us putting together detailed spreadsheets to chart the growth and development of each individual cat, carefully calibrating and planning which feline to sacrifice, and which ones are most suitable for breeding generations of overpowered kitty-soldiers. Even then, you’ll eventually be shrugging off defeats like a champ
You may also find yourself in some strangely hilarious situations, thanks to developers Tyler Glaiel and Edmund McMillen’s trademark scatological humor. At one point, my cats were fighting a bunch of farting cats (stay with me here) who, upon getting attacked, would retaliate by passing a cloud of poison gas and propelling itself forward. What happened was that one of them did just these and crashed into a second farting cat, who then tooted its own gas right into a third cat, leading to a chain reaction of these gassy cats just farting and headbutting into one another till a couple of them simply passed out from the damage. This sight is so comical that I couldn’t help but marvel at the cacophony of it all.
That said, juvenile humor such as this is in spades here, and while I did enjoy the unexpected laughs that arise from its procedurally generated runs, the creepy banter of some characters and the incessant meowing are a lot less funny. And unlike the religious text that can be found in McMillen’s The Binding of Isaac, Mewgenics is extremely light on plot, aside from the machinations of one Doctor Beanies, the mad scientist hell-bent on cat domination. These didn’t really bother or mar my playthrough, since the meat of the experience, the delectable loop of battling and cat management, is extremely and particularly savory. Mewgenics has tons of tricks up its sleeve, constantly challenging you to come up with new tactics in order to keep up with its antics. Like a blast from the past, it’s a pastiche of some of the best Flash games: the edgy humor, the sheer creativity, the unexpected complexity, and that it’s an absolute time sink.
