"Big," "crazy," and "challenging" were the first adjectives that developers Edmund McMillen and Tyler Glaiel chose to describe their upcoming roguelike, Mewgenics.
"I think a lot of people see the game and they think it's this like standard turn-based strategy game with some cat breeding," McMillen told Destructoid before a hands-on preview on Nov. 6. "I promise you, it is deeper than almost anything you've played. It's astoundingly deep."
Mewgenics' tutorial is already more complex—and scatological—than your average roguelike. Instead of letting me pick my starter from a set of characters with fixed stats and archetypes, like The Binding of Isaac and Vampire Survivors do, the game gave me two cats with random initial stats and skills.
The tutorial plays like a standard roguelike RPG. You fight enemies in maps with unique layouts as if FTL had a baby with The Binding of Isaac, then choose one of a selection of random cat skills to upgrade your characters as they level up before you keep exploring the map. When you finally finish a run, the unique chaos of Mewgenics starts.
Cats you've used retire and are no longer playable, but they can breed now. Their offspring randomly inherit their parents' skills, passives, and stats. You can get boring or even bad breeds, but you can get lucky like me and get two sevens in the base stats. "That is a crazy good cat," Tyler told me as I started the adventure.
From this point on, the randomness just keeps building. I now had new cats with random stats, random skills, on a random map with random enemies on a random layout. I had to win so I could pick a random skill for a cat that randomly leveled up, all while synergizing it all with their random equipment and base stats, which would be randomized again when the cats bred before my next attempt. It's a chaotic version of Baldur's Gate 3, where every little choice matters and affects the future of the game.
Mewgenics feels complex, but not right off the bat
In this short preview, I could see the potential for combos, strategies, and teambuilding of Mewgenics. However, the game only reveals itself after some hours of gameplay. The first run is easy—as it needs to be—because there are too many status effects, skills, passives, and items that force you to pause to understand what's happening. At one point, one of my cats had seven different status effects on it (thanks to farting too much), which felt a bit overwhelming.
It is necessary to put in the time to really get the game. You must learn its vocabulary much like you would have to learn keywords in Magic: The Gathering. The card game, according to McMillen, is "the foundational core and lifeblood" of Mewgenics. "It's this complicated system that has systems on systems within it." He added that most people take around four hours to get comfortable with the game and "start playing to its strengths."
My first run of Mewgenics felt even too easy, and the random stats and skills felt almost irrelevant at the start. "You don't have to understand everything that's going on in the game right away," Tyler told me. "That's how you make this digestible for people. People can figure out a few things that they want to pay attention to and pay attention to those, and it should work for them."
The slow start of Mewgenics encouraged me to play more instead of stopping early. It's clear there's a bigger challenge later on that requires a lot of thought and dedication to these systems. For veterans who like to take the game to its extremes, Tyler is clear that "it's fully possible to break the game and get overpowered builds."
This build diversity and creative play is possible because Mewgenics is "a game of a million options, and it's forgiving enough to allow you to experiment with those options and find a comfortable play style," Edmund said. The game's 900-plus items are to blame for these endless options. It's so many items that even the devs were surprised when I dropped the bizarre Enchanting Poop after an event. "I've never gotten that result, I've never gotten the item," they said.
Mewgenics is a bold promise that few developers can deliver
The challenging part of Mewgenics, where you're able to put these complex mechanics and random events to the test, hides behind a few hours of gameplay. My concern is that all the chaos and complexity could be too much to make sense of, but it's only possible to determine once the full game is out.
Very few developers would make these multiple systems work well together in a way that they became tools for fun gameplay instead of a luck-based mess. I would be skeptical if anyone else tried something this ambitious with so many moving parts. But since Mewgenics is in the hands of people who made The Binding of Isaac a hit for the last 15 years, I'm excited to see where Edmund McMillen and Tyler Glaiel take the game when Mewgenics gets its full release.
The shadow of Isaac
Edmund hopes Mewgenics becomes a massive hit like The Binding of Isaac, but he knows how hard that is. "I don't think people even understand how big Isaac is," he said. "It's astounding. It's stupid that a game like that is as huge as it is at this point. So many people are still playing it."
Tyler agreed when Edmund said Mewgenics is his best game ever, even better than The Binding of Isaac. "This is the most fun game I've ever made," Edmund said. "And I don't expect everyone to agree with me. But I have a feeling that there will be a lot of people that really like the game."
He said half of Mewgenics' game testers play way more than the duo expected. "A week later, [some testers] will be like 'yeah, I got 280 hours in the game.' That's an achievement in itself, and it's one of those situations where I can say that regardless of how it sells. I'm very, very happy."
The devs are confident that The Binding of Isaac's biggest fans will love Mewgenics and put thousands of hours into it. "The way the game plays, unfolds, is experienced, the experimentation, the 'aha' moments, the broken builds and breaking the game" are all similar to Isaac, Edmund said.
The duo is so happy with Mewgenics that they have DLC plans and don't want to stop development too soon. The game "needs to make back its money and then be able to fund the development of DLCs, but it would have to bomb pretty hard to not do that," Edmund explained. He added that "It feels like we've got it takes six years to get into the groove and now we have to stop. So it's not going to stop."
Mewgenics releases on Feb. 10, 2026 on Steam with Deck support planned.
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