From Isaac to MEWGENICS
Edmund McMillen has returned with another dark, mischievous roguelike. After The Binding of Isaac, this time the protagonists are cats. I bought MEWGENICS at launch on February 11, 2026 and quickly lost more than seven hours to it.
The new game shares Isaac’s sensibility but not its combat. It is a turn-based tactical roguelike built around breeding, team composition, equipment, and repeated expeditions.
The trailer’s familiar bad taste
The promotional videos were pure McMillen: strange music, deliberately unpleasant live-action cats, suggestive jokes, and a darkly comic story. An earlier trailer showed a childless couple adopting a house full of cats. The animals wrecked the place, and the couple forgave everything for the simplest possible reason: they were cute.
Grotesque, cultish, and funny
The hand-drawn cats are deliberately ugly. They make a mess, fight, breed, and produce an absurd variety of meows. The game even includes a menu button whose only purpose is to play a random cat sound—from sweet chirps to hoarse screams.
That ugliness is not a flaw in the art direction. It is the point: the game consistently turns familiar cute-cat imagery into something unruly and funny.
The progression loop: adventure, retirement, and descendants
A party contains up to four cats. Each has a class, equipment, skills, and stats that improve during an expedition. After finishing an adventure, a cat retires and can no longer join another run. Retired cats can produce stronger descendants, be given to NPCs to improve shops, or simply be released.
Loot upgrades the house and equips the next party. Even if every adventurer dies, the daily supply of stray cats lets you assemble another team and start climbing again.
Tactical roguelike combat
Combat resembles Into the Breach: a small battlefield, visible enemy intentions, deliberate movement, terrain, traps, control effects, and a constant need to protect vulnerable units.
More than a dozen classes, many skills per class, and hundreds of items create surprising combinations. A run can become overwhelmingly strong, or it can collapse through bad luck and poor positioning. As in Isaac, the pleasure comes from recognizing a weak situation and turning it into a winning build through equipment and careful choices.
After seven hours, the difficulty felt fair. Understanding each enemy’s rules usually revealed a workable answer.
Music and tone
Isaac uses electronic music, rock, and choral vocals to create fear and tension. MEWGENICS is more playful. Its songs introduce bosses and narrate situations with ridiculous lyrics, reinforcing the game’s irreverent, deconstructive tone.
Deconstructing the symbol of the cat
MEWGENICS tears apart the idealized image of the cat with ugly bodies, harsh voices, and terrible behavior. That is what makes it interesting. Real animals, like people, can be beautiful or ugly, gentle or troublesome. When an animal carries too much projected human emotion, are we still loving the animal—or only an abstract symbol we created?