Mewgenics

Announced by Team Meat in 2012, cancelled, reacquired, and rebuilt over thirteen years, Mewgenics finally arrived in February and immediately justified the wait. Edmund McMillen and Tyler Glaiel — of The Binding of Isaac and Super Meat Boy — have made something that has no real comparison: a legacy roguelike about breeding an ever-mutating dynasty of cats and marching them into turn-based tactical combat.

Cat DnD, and it works

The loop splits in two. Between runs you breed: pairing cats passes down traits, classes, and mutations, so your roster evolves across generations rather than resetting. In combat, you draft abilities and items and fight on procedurally generated grids where positioning and synergy matter enormously. The result is a tactics game where the character creation is the deepest system — and where a horrifying genetic accident can become your best unit.

The synergies get gloriously out of hand, exactly as anyone who loved Isaac would hope.

The caveats

It’s dense, and the first several hours can feel like reading a manual in a language you half-know. The humour, meanwhile, is pure McMillen — crude, gross, and gleefully juvenile — which is a feature for his audience and a wall for everyone else. Some players also bristle at how much a run can hinge on breeding luck.

Verdict

Steam sits at Very Positive (around 92% of 48,000 reviews), critics landed near 88-90 on Metacritic, and it moved over a million copies in its first week while beating Hades II’s concurrent record. At $29.99 for 200+ hours of content, it’s one of the best-value games of the year — provided you can stomach the cat puke jokes.