Review: Mewgenics (Switch 2) – Tactics Bliss Wrapped In A Hilarious, Must-Play Package

The perfect place to spend my life with fleas and parasites

The Binding of Isaac is perhaps the greatest roguelike ever made, or at the very least, I wouldn't argue with anyone who felt that way. So when developer and indie-game legend Edmund McMillen said that it was merely a basic roguelike to get his feet into the water before creating Mewgenics, my interest was certainly piqued. But 13 years after its announcement, Mewgenics arrived on PC earlier this year, and there was no way it could live up to the expectations after that long… Right? I'll let it already being my second-most played game ever on Steam behind Isaac do the talking.

Teaming up with The End Is Nigh co-developer Tyler Glaiel, Mewgenics is perhaps McMillen's strangest game to date – which is saying something. Here's the elevator pitch: you breed countless messed up cats in your home before sending them out to war in a roguelike tactical RPG, with classes, mechanics, and stats ripped right out of Dungeons & Dragons. It's messed up, it's hilarious, it's macabre, it's wildly inappropriate, and most of all it's just a phenomenal strategy game.

A run of Mewgenics works like so: you'll make your way through the map of a given area, with each node corresponding to different events, such as self-contained tactical battles, random events which can drastically alter your run, or finding items and shops, before tackling the boss at the end of each area to move on or end your run there. You get to take four felines of varying classes, from your classics like Fighter, Mage, and Tank, to some esoteric ones like Tinkerer, Necromancer, and Psychic.

However, how you breed your cats leads into which classes you'll bestow them with, as a cat's stats are determined by the stats of its parents. The breeding system is very in-depth, taking into account the cat's room, the temperaments of each cat and how inbred the cat in question is. This adds a whole other layer of strategy to the game before you even set foot (paw?) on the battlefield, as you can spend hours of your time pairing the correct cats around your house to craft the ultimate super soldier.

On top of that, cats can have mutations, health conditions, or positive buffs that pass on through generations; you can have a cat with IBS, diabetes, or OCD, and you'll need to decide how you want those conditions to be passed on – because despite the likes of Crohn's Disease being a net negative in general, a lot of disorders can have pretty good synergy (like with the Crown of Feculence item that makes poops sentient teammates).

If you've played Isaac, you'll know that it gets brutal. One thing can destroy a run, and with Mewgenics that's perhaps even more prevalent. The random events give you options, with them being based on your stats. For example, someone with high Dex can sneak around opponents during these scenarios. However, it's possible for one wrong decision to absolutely tank a run for you.

Act 2 really starts to test your mettle as it introduces 'The Desert' as a biome. It's constantly hot, and while dealing with the heat, healing abilities are lessened, and you no longer heal automatically at the end of a battle. This can be offset with water-based abilities or items, so it's not insurmountable, but it's definitely going to be a point of frustration for many, and despite almost 200 hours in-game, I still struggle to beat the Spewer boss fight. There's nothing that ruins my enjoyment, but there's definitely frustration to be found in Mewgenics.

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the soundtrack. Isaac composers Ridiculon return with what may already be one of my favourite game soundtracks of all-time. Each area of the roguelike plays with a great little instrumental piece, and when you reach the boss at the end of the area, the song truly reveals itself with expanded instrumentation and the introduction of lyrics.

These range from a jazzy tune about tripping on drugs, a kaiju soundtrack with lyrics about not forgetting to brush your teeth, and a Tom Waits-like composition that is the best video game song about feces since Conker's Bad Fur Day: a song which resulted in me having the refrain "Three little turds, perched by your doorstep" in my head for weeks.

Not to mention there's a selection of radio tunes to listen to when cleaning your house of cat poop which are full of gross and disturbing brilliance; I'm not sure how I'm going to explain a song called Fleas and Parasites being my most listened-to song of 2026.

The Switch 2 port thankfully knocks it out of the park from my time with it, with the only times the game seems to run at a lower frame rate during a couple of non-gameplay menus. Crucially, the console release has seen the developers go back in and fix the traditional gamepad controls, which basically amounted to controlling a cursor on the PC version to make it work far better with regular buttons. This means that my productivity is even worse from here on out, as the ability to play this on the go is too good to pass up.

But of course, this is Switch 2, and the mouse controls and touch screen controls work perfectly for a strategy game like this. On top of that, there's cross-save with the Steam release, allowing anyone like me who started earlier this year to continue my adventures on the go, which has in turn allowed me to check some of the game's more demanding battlefields on the handheld.

Tactical roguelikes have been done well before, but Mewgenics feels like the next evolution of them. The metagame aspects of building your army of kitties gives the game a massive new layer over its contemporaries; this in turn gives runs far more variety and depth than some of the more static takes on the genre, making me still as engaged almost 200 hours in as I was in my humble shack with my first four cats.

Conclusion

Mewgenics is not only my favourite game of 2026 and one that's unlikely to be unseated from its throne, but it's also already one of my favourite roguelikes and strategy games of all time. It builds upon other classics that blend the two genres, like Into The Breach and Fights in Tight Spaces, and imbues them with brilliant encounters, enemy design, and systems so deep you may never fully get the hang of them.

Mewgenics is an extremely special kind of game that only comes around once in a blue moon, even if it is filled to the brim with cat turds.