Mewgenics
Played 11 hours, but that’s enough to get the gist.
A very hard one to rate, because stripped of all its trappings, this game is basically catnip to me: a mash-up of XCom, Darkest Dungeon and Slay the Spire that I can easily play while catching up on my podcasts. McMillen and Glaiel demonstrate their long experience in the indie game racket by producing mechanics that are finely considered, challenging whilst rarely feeling unfair or tedious (the bosses quickly become damage sponges, mind you).
That on its own probably wouldn’t be enough to hook me, but then there’s the Binding of Isaac element: a series of synergies through the items and abilities that feel breathtakingly endless. The real fun of the game is discovering these, and exploiting them to make incredibly fucked up cats that can piss runs single-pawedly. One small example: I had a thief cat whose base ability was to teleport rather than move. Powerful enough on its own, but then I got an ability which refunded his move every time he picked up a coin, and an item which caused coins to fall out of enemies every time they were hit. I had a cat who could just teleport around every map picking up all the money and inflicting backstabs wherever he went, completely untouchable.
StS understood how addictive this concept of enabling the player to break the game if they could just find the right formula in their runs, and Mewgenics is really the first game I’ve played since that taps into it in the same way. I can see myself playing it for a long time to come.
So why’s it hard to rate? Because of everything else. The characters don’t even reach the level of stereotypes, they’re half-arsed cartoons drawn by someone who clearly doesn’t leave the house much. The tone and aesthetic are determinedly ugly, juvenile and obsessed above all things with shit. It’s possible to argue that these trappings suited BoI, the protagonist being a child, and the dungeons essentially being a product of his over-active imagination. If I had spent more than a decade supporting a game like that, I’d want anything other than to immerse myself in more poo and dead baby jokes. But no, turns out McMillen just loves that stuff. The experience has the uncomfortable sensation of being trapped in a world created by someone who refused to grow up. And not someone who refused to grow up but has interesting reference pools, like Schrader or Lucas.
Probably the most tellingly childish part of the game is that there’s no point to it. You’re breeding and abusing these animals because… why? Because. The same reason eight year olds will torment a stray with a bad paw, if you don’t stop them. There’s a boss you can get early on which is a molly and a bunch of her kittens. She doesn’t try and fight you, she just buffs and heals the kittens. If you try and hit them she swaps with them to take the hit herself, a reasonably novel take on the standard broodmother boss template. But you can stun her so you can take the kittens out anyway, the ideal strategy. Every time you kill one of them she exhibits distress.
What am I supposed to feel, doing this for no greater purpose than ‘because’? Amusement? There’s a rottenness to it all, a failure to understand human emotion and why you’d ever care about cats, that speaks of stunted development.
It’s a 9/10 for the mechanics and a 2/10 for everything else. I find I can’t actually recommend this without feeling like I’m covered in tee hee poo poo and pee pee, so I’m going to give it a 5/10.
