I keep waking up thinking about Fish Sticks.
Not the snack—Fish Sticks the cat: a stubby, squashed-faced unit I raised, equipped him with a soul-sucking maggot trait, and then watched him vanish into a demon’s maw while the rest of my ragtag crew tried to make sense of the carnage. That kind of ridiculous, grotesque storytelling—half comedy, half horror, all emergent—is Mewgenics in microcosm.
A gloriously messy pedigree
Mewgenics arrives from Edmund McMillen and Tyler Glaiel, names familiar to anyone who’s spent unhealthy amounts of time with indie roguelikes. If The Binding of Isaac is McMillen’s baptism-by-gore, Mewgenics is his eccentric graduate thesis: the same appetite for shock and dark humor, married to a bewilderingly deep set of systems. The game pairs a Tamagotchi-style cat household with turn-based, grid combat that rewards lateral thinking and happy accidents.
At a glance the two halves feel odd together. One minute you’re rearranging furniture in a ramshackle shack to tweak breeding odds; the next you’re on a 10x10 battlefield, chaining lightning, water and status effects into neat little dead-cat fireworks. But they don’t just coexist — they feed each other. Veteran cats retire and beget offspring; those offspring inherit stats, traits and sometimes bizarre mutations that define the next run.
Combat and cat genetics: where the game really sings
Combat is Mewgenics’ strongest suit. It plays like a compact, ruthless blend of tactical classics and modern roguelites: move, position, exploit environmental rules, and pray the RNG gods aren’t in a mood to ruin your day. The rules are simple on paper, fiendish in practice. Position an electrophile next to a puddle and a lightning cat, and you’ll giggle when the enemies get thoroughly toasted. Glue a superhero mask onto a cleric who also heals on hit and you’ll produce an accidental flying mine. Those moments—where disparate abilities accidentally combine into glorious mayhem—are the game’s best reward.
Randomness is a feature, not a bug. Every run feels like a tiny sitcom where the cast of misfit cats gain, lose or mutate into unforgettable personalities: the beardy Bagpuss lookalike who explodes from within, the cube-headed feline, the mage who keeps getting trampled. Some failures read like tragedies; others are comedy gold. Even when the mechanics screw you, you usually get a story worth retelling.
But Mewgenics isn’t forgiving. Death is permanent. You lose cats, gear and sometimes momentum. Unlike many modern roguelites that hand you incremental progression on every loss, Mewgenics’ macro-progression is slower and stingier. That design choice amplifies tension—every fight can turn catastrophically—while also making losing feel expensive.
The house that breeds you champions (or disasters)
The base layer—the cat-management simulation—starts simple and blossoms into something bafflingly deep. Place compatible cats in rooms, jam the place full of stat-boosting knick-knacks, and hope for good litters. Furniture changes breeding rates and mutation odds; the shack’s decor quickly becomes a spreadsheet of priorities rather than an interior design exercise. If you’d rather skip the awkward animations, you can turn off the default humping visuals and replace them with weirder, more creative birthing scenes (pentagrams, storks, you name it).
The breeding loop is where Mewgenics both wins and tests players. Good bloodlines accelerate your later runs; bad ones require you to do grim line-management—culling entire families before a hereditary trait does more harm than good. It’s macabre, brutally efficient, and oddly compulsive.
Tone: juvenile gross-out vs clever systems
Let’s be frank: the humor is often juvenile. Poop jokes, undeveloped foetuses, and deeply tasteless double entendres populate the game. If that repels you, there’s no sugarcoating it. The aesthetic leans post-South Park teenage edgelord—intentional, loud and frequently gross.
Still, beneath the filth is a genuinely clever game design. The juvenile stuff is loud, but the systems that produce emergent combat and breeding stories are quietly elegant. You’ll forgive a lot once you’ve orchestrated a set of interactions that feels, for lack of a better word, diabolically brilliant.
Who should play it (and who should probably skip it)
Play this if:
- You love roguelikes that reward experimentation and creative combinations.
- You enjoy emergent narratives and unusual, sometimes grotesque, humor.
- You don’t mind permadeath and a slower long-term progression curve.
- Graphic toilet humor or sexualized animal gags make you uncomfortable.
- You want a gentle, low-stress roguelike where every loss still feels like progress.
Skip it if:
If platform choice matters to you: Mewgenics launches as a PC title and really shines there, but broader conversations about where to play are active—if you game on the go, recent quality‑of‑life improvements like the Steam Deck’s display-off low-power download mode make handheld sessions easier, and the console market is heating up with hardware shifts such as Nintendo’s stronger-than-expected Switch 2 forecast. For now, though, expect the canonical experience to be PC-first.
A closing note that isn’t a tidy finish
Mewgenics is messy in all the best ways. It’s a little cruel, occasionally puerile, and wildly inventive. You’ll lose cats you love, breed nightmares you regret, and still want to play one more run. That compulsion—equal parts dread and curiosity—is the game’s real hook. If you can sit with the taste it serves up, you’ll find a roguelike that keeps delivering moments you’ll laugh at, shudder at, and tell your friends about until they beg you to stop.