Mewgenics review – 100 hours later, this is the deepest strategy game I've played in years

Mewgenics is a strategy game about breeding cats. It’s also a game about inflicting untold horrors on those cats until they become super strong. There are also many poop jokes. I’m not sure I can get away with saying I accidentally put 100 hours into it, but the amount surprises me every time I look.

If a game about making cats multiply sounds strange to you, then strap in, because that’s potentially the most pedestrian idea that Mewgenics has. It’s a turn-based strategy game where you take a squad of four felines down a path filled with enemy encounters and random events.

Along the way, cats can level up, increasing one of their base stats like strength or movement range, and they can also pick up various items and armor pieces. Keeping ahead of the difficulty curve is vital, and if the cats return home, they can pass their new-found power to their offspring, should they procreate.

That’s kind of it, that’s the gist. Only… it also isn’t, because there are NPCs that give you side quests, and you have to donate unwanted cats to improve your base, item storage, and unlock new bits of equipment for future adventures. It’s a lot, but it works, as long as you don’t think too hard about where those poor cats are going.

The depth of Mewgenics is absurd, and after 100 hours, I’m astounded when a new path opens or a new item unlocks. I’m making constant progress, and it doesn’t seem to stop. I’ve never had two identical runs, and I’m beginning to think that just isn’t possible.

Before each run, I choose up to four cats from my house and assign them a class, most of which will be familiar to anyone who has bumped into an RPG in the last 30 years. Tanks, fighters, mages – it’s all fairly basic stuff on the face of things. Once I lock the classes in, each one gets assigned random abilities and a passive, which is where things start to get interesting.

Because of the random nature of my cat’s abilities, I must embrace the chaos. One run might have a tank that spawns living rocks that fight for me, while another may have that same class of cat grow thorns that damage enemies that damage them. Having a plan never worked for me, and formulating a strategy on the fly was the way forward.

After a while, I know what I’m looking for before a run. Certain abilities and traits are super effective, and I want to relive past glories, although it never quite works out that way. My favorite of the bunch was during a modified run that infested any allied units with spiders – if that unit dies, the spiders burst from the body and join me in the fight. I had a unit that spawned flies before each encounter, so I ended up with an army of spider-infested flies that did most of the fighting for me. It was great.

The battle system is robust, if a little messy. The visuals can muddy the action, with scenery obscuring enemy units and vital pickups. When I press the Ctrl key, it simplifies everything on screen, turning every unit into what looks like a board game token. I had to remind myself to use it often, because the default look was often a mess.

I found it quite difficult to gel with the early 2000s-era flash cartoon aesthetic, especially when it was coupled with an early 2000s-era flash cartoon sense of humor. Mewgenics is plenty of things: complicated, rewarding, challenging, but it is not funny. Every NPC that crossed my path made me cringe harder than the last, and some of the ideas on show are real bottom-of-the-barrel stuff.

From a strange, almost mummy-like character repeating the same phrase about my stuff being soaked in urine after a failed run, to a professor character who calls you stupid for hitting the smallest snag, there is no charm to be found here. The best thing I did was turn the ‘humping animations’ to ‘safe’, which transformed the oft-repeated sex screen with one of cats being brought a kitten by a bird, or performing a satanic ritual that awarded them with offspring.

It makes me wonder who this game is for. It’s all subjective, of course, but I feel like those of a deep strategy ilk may not want to put up with a constant barrage of fart jokes, and those who want a lighter, joke-ridden game won’t want to commit to the steep learning curve.

If you can somehow connect with Mewgenics’ love of the grotesque, and find some humor in contracting feline AIDS midway through a run, while also engaging with its deep, systematic strategy, then this might actually be an all-timer for you. I couldn’t, though, and while I was enthralled for a time with taking down each new goal, ultimately, I didn’t feel great while playing it.

Mewgenics is a good, maybe even great, strategy game that is also criminally unfunny. It offers more depth than any strategy game I’ve played in years. From cultivating the perfect team to putting them through their paces on a run, it is genuinely ingenious how everything works and connects. But much like getting a brilliant present wrapped in something foul, I didn’t really want to open it.