Mewgenics

This game is so cool i can make inbred cats fight god i really couldnt have asked for anything else thanks edmund

Mewgenics is not a game I thought I would like. I don't care much for Tactics games or Roguelikes, but I heard good things so I gave Mewgenics a shot and, 160 hours later, I can safely say there's just something about this game that keeps pulling you back in. It has the sauce. Marinara, specifically. So, what'd I like? Firstly, despite being in a fairly complex genre (and being a complex game itself), Mewgenics does a VERY good job at explaining its mechanics and easing the player into the gameplay loop. With other tactics games I've tried, I find things get a little too complicated a bit too quickly, but I can't say that about Mewgenics. As the game goes on, it slowly introduces more mechanics, and through experimentation, you'll find what works, what doesn't, and how you can use abilities together to augment your runs. By the end of the game, I was pulling some wacky strategies to win battles. It really adds a lot to the experience to think "Would this work? Surely not..." only to find it's not only an acceptable strategy, but a POWERFUL one. I've had some real memorable moments throughout my playthrough, beating the game in ways I didn't think was possible, winning fights I thought for sure were losses, or even the times where I screwed myself over through such an intricate series of events it'd be safe to say I was the first one to achieve it. It's one thing for a game to be a pleasant experience all the way through, but Mewgenics feels like a rollercoaster with how things can switch on a dime, both for better and worse. But the praise isn't just with the gameplay. The music in Mewgenics is something else entirely. Typically, video game music blends into the background. It's meant to. It's meant to give a bit of feeling into the world without being distracting. Mewgenics does not do this. The music is overpowering, and yet, it's not distracting, it doesn't make the game worse, in fact, it's one of the best parts! I have not heard a soundtrack with not only such consistent quality, but one that keeps outdoing itself the deeper you delve into the game's areas. The music had already hit a perfect rating halfway through, and yet despite that, it gets better, and better, and better, and by the end, the music is of such high quality it makes me tear up. I would not be afraid to call Mewgenics' soundtrack my favourite video game soundtrack, of all time. Not one of the tracks on display is something I'd skip. I could listen to each and every one on loop and not get bored of it. Ridiculon did a fantastic job! And the praise doesn’t stop there! While one side of Mewgenics is the battles, the tactics/roguelike gameplay, there’s the other side, the house, where you breed cats and birth into the world what could either be described as a beautiful abomination or an affront to god, no in-between. Mewgenics pulls from a massive list of names when you get new cats, and initially this was something I was unsure about. Why not give the player the ability to name cats themselves? To allow them to give themselves that personal connection? After some deliberation, I can say, I get it. Getting a cat named “Mommy Milkers” or “Standing Still” or “Pogchamp” and then finding out just how powerful that cat is and how much it can carry a run is something special. You couldn’t manufacture that yourself, it NEEDS to happen naturally. I’ve had some cute cats, some ugly cats, some cats I couldn’t wrap my head around, and it only serves to make the experience feel even more other-worldly. It’s a video game that understands what video games are. It plays with the concept, it’s smart, it teaches its mechanics well, and best of all, it has a damn good sense of humour. The humour of this game has been a bit hotly contested over the few months it’s been out. Some people, like myself, love the humour. Others do not. I do not mean to judge those with an incorrect sense of humour, but I don’t think this is the game for you. Your cat WILL develop a scat fetish and you will find it hilarious. I think where the humour shines through the best is the radio. The music that plays during the house portion of the game is framed as a radio station, WMEW 99.9 Lives, and they go the extra mile with it. Fake ads, track announcements, and Jimmy “The Hammer” Valentine. Sure, bring back a character from an obscure TV show from the 90s, put him in your video game, why not, he’s hilarious. Carl Edge does a fantastic job with the character and any time I heard he was about to come on, I immediately tuned my volume up to the max I listened to him cough up a lung, or happily describe how dozens of children got crushed by boulders, or laugh at his own joke for a full 2 minutes. Anywhere jokes could be squeezed in, you’ll find them in droves. Okay, so, negatives. I have a few. Firstly, the game's runs can be LONG. It got to a point where a single run would take me up to 4 hours (!!) of gameplay. There are ways to speed up the game, like by setting the game speed up, although I found this could make the fights a bit hard to read, so I'd often leave it at the default. The runs can and will drag on and fights can potentially last 10 or 20 minutes longer than they were meant to depending on the enemies you get. This isn't terrible on its own, it's inoffensive at worst, actually. Long game is long. But my real problem lies with the second complaint. Runs can feel just a little too dependent on RNG sometimes. Mewgenics has events spaces which can do nothing, or give your cats insane buffs, or give your cats such insane debuffs that the cat that received it might as well be dead. Spending so much time on a run just to have it end so abruptly and at no fault of your own doesn't feel motivating, it feels infuriating. It's my one big gripe with the game and looking at the game's upcoming updates, this looks to be a problem the developers are going to fix. Lastly, the game's routes can feel imbalanced in terms of difficulty. When I need to play one of the game's acts, there's the route I ALWAYS take and the other route that I play for progression only and never again. Some of the bosses of one route can feel too punishing in comparison to bosses found in the other route and I found it would often funnel me to playing through the same areas over and over so I didn't have to deal with "the bad bosses". I hope this is something that's addressed in updates, because it sucks that there were some parts of the game I avoided because they felt just a bit too hard in comparison to the other option. Overall, just give it a shot, and take your sweet time with everything it has to offer. It took me 3 months in total to complete this game, and I don't regret one second of it. There’s something special here.