Step aside Hades 2, a game about breeding neurospicy cats just became the best-performing roguelike ever

Mewgenics has been a bona fide hit, but then again, who expected anything different? Edmund McMillen is the mind behind Super Meat Boy and The Binding of Isaac, and has been working on this cat-breeding roguelike for 14 years. His long-time collaborator, Tyler Glaiel, has a similarly impressive and varied CV. With the goodwill of all fans in their sails and a cracking game to share with the world, there was no doubt that Mewgenics could rise to the top of 2026’s gaming offerings. But nobody expected it to grow quite so big, quite so fast.

McMillen said that Mewgenics earned back its development budget in just three hours. Just five days after launch, it hit a peak of 115,428 concurrent players on Steam – more than any other roguelike on the platform. For comparison, Hades reached a peak of just 54,240 concurrent players, and Hades 2 managed 112,947. Not bad for a game that took risks and didn’t want to play it safe.

That doesn’t necessarily make Mewgenics a better game than either Hades title, nor does it make it more successful. Firstly, this number doesn’t take into account console players, and also only counts the number of players breeding cats or making pacts with Athena at the same time. By many other metrics, Hades is still superior.

Mewgenics has an impressive Metacritic average of 89, whereas Hades sits at 93 and Hades 2 95. I don’t put much stock in these averages, but others do. On Steam, too, Mewgenics has 89% positive reviews, landing it just shy of that coveted ‘overwhelmingly positive’ tag. Hades 2 has 95% positive reviews and Hades has an eye-watering 98% positive feedback, a number that’s frankly unheard of when you’re taking an average of nearly 140,000 reviews.

I’m not trying to disparage Mewgenics here, I’m just painting a broader picture. It’s no mean feat that McMillen and Glaiel’s indie game has reached 115,000 concurrent players, and it clearly deserves to be mentioned in discussions of the best this genre can offer. The SteamDB stats speak for themselves.

Mewgenics is available now for $26.99 / £22.49. You can buy it on Steam here.

If you like Hades, if you like The Binding of Isaac or any of McMillen and Glaiel’s prior games, you should give Mewgenics a whirl. With numbers like these, chances are you already have. But for just 27 bucks, the price of a couple of coffees, you can’t really go wrong.