The latest game from The Binding of Isaac creator Edmund McMillen is out today, a roguelite unlike any other in which you must master the RPG-like turn-based battles of a group of cats, who upon victory will all immediately retire and require you to start over with their kitten spawn. Think Rogue Legacy meets Slay the Spire but played like X-COM. With poop. So much poop. Here’s a bunch of stuff I’d love to have already known when I started playing.
Never fall in love
So the central conceit of Mewgenics is that you don’t get to keep your cats. While it’s so tempting to think of them like a deck in a deckbuilding roguelite, and thus start to rely on particular aspects of a particular kitten’s abilities, or even more the way two or three cats’ skillsets can seamlessly work together to create one-two-three punches that dominate in battles, they’re always going to be cruelly taken away from you. If you do have the purrfect team, all that means is you’re going to reach a new goal, defeat a new location, and as such be forced to return home and see your menagerie retire. And even if you try to recreate it, pick a Hunter, Cleric and Fighter like last time and set up that same synergy, they’ll have different skills, spells, and abilities next time out. That teleport you’d built your whole game around? Nope, you don’t have that now. And even if you did, your Fighter won’t be able to spawn rocks this time, and…It’s about letting go, moving on, never getting attached.
Food goes down faster than you think
At the start of the game you’ll have 50 portions of cat food, and it seems like it’ll last forever. Each cat requires one portion per day, and when you’ve got just four of them in the house you feel safe for the foreseeable future. But after, say, another four nights you’ll now have at least eight cats via the arrival of strays, and likely another two or three kittens by the magic of nature. That’s at least 10 cats to feed per night, and your supplies have already dwindled getting here. So pick up food whenever you can. It’s gathered while out on adventures, but that of course requires either successfully reaching a goal farther than you’ve been before, or abandoning a run after a boss and not making vital progress. So when you see it on the shelves in the stores, grab it. In fact, think about saving up for that 100 coin expansion to your food supply stores with some urgency. I wish I’d done that straight away.
You need to clean up poop
To say that Mewgenics is obsessed with poop is to understate things. This is a game where poo plays a vital role in battles, used to boost your cats, or to block tiles. Then there’s the pee, and the farts, and well, it’s an Edmund McMillen game. But given this fecal focus, it’s odd that it forgets to tell you early on how important it is to remove it from your base. The cats’ wellbeing depends on a bunch of factors, including the furniture you add later in proceedings, but early on the simplest way to keep them happy and healthy is to click on the sweet curlers to make them disappear.
Middle click for clarity
Something I stumbled on quite by mistake, as Mewgenics didn’t mention it, is that holding the middle mouse button down offers a far clearer view of what’s happening in any battle. (It’s Y on a controller.) The game is splendidly drawn, but it’s also very cluttered. Holding down the middle button causes a level to represent itself like a far simpler board game, with red counters for enemy positions and green counters for your squad. This is so very, very helpful when trying to get a clearer idea of the challenge, especially when so many enemies can be teeny maggots or flies, pretty much the same color as the background, not least when they’re hidden in long grass or behind a rock. Hold down that button, get a good sense of the situation, and then crack on.
Eat stuff you find on the ground
Like in life, you’ll be far better off if you pick up any food you see lying on the ground and eat it. While it’s generally a good idea to have one of your cats be a Cleric on any run, since that’s the most reliable source of vital healing, it’s not the only way to improve health. Levels tend to be covered in all sorts of debris, and a lot of it turns out to be edible. Hover you mouse over anything and it’ll pop up letting you know if you can eat it, and if a cat stands on that tile it’ll automatically gobble it up. This can make a really big difference, and is too easy to forget when thinking about the 790 other vital parts of positioning for battles, causing you to over-rely on your healer.
Kill the birds
Birds on the battlefield are an early mystery. You’ll immediately assume they’re part of the enemy team, but that’s not the case at all. They are in fact neutral, appearing with a grey counter when you middle-click (a great way to be sure they’re not enemies), and as such will most likely leave you alone but for annoyingly taking up a tile. But kill them anyway! They fly off of their own accord a few rounds in to any battle, so you need to prioritize them, but not only will they likely drop useful items but they’ll also see the killing kitty’s stats all increase for doing so. That can be a big advantage, especially when taking on mini-bosses or especially irritating foes.
This game is way bigger than you think
It’s tempting, given the Slay the Spire-like delivery of the paths down which you adventure, to assume Mewgenics is about mastering those levels and then trying to outdo your previous runs. But that’s not it at all: this is a game far more focused on progress. And there’s a lot more of it than you’re expecting. Not only does each level have multiple routes through of varying difficulty, but there are far more of them than you might imagine. A great way to make this clear to yourself is to play non-stop for six hours, then go look at your save game to see it tell you that you’ve completed eight percent of the game. There’s so much to find in here, and it wants you to find it.
You can’t lose…sorta
Well, you can lose all the time. But you can’t lose lose. While all four of your kitty-cats can fall in battle, causing you to lose the lot and return home empty-pawed, that’s not a game over. Even if they were your last four available cats, it doesn’t end. Instead, you just need to keep accepting new strays until you have four to take on a new run. Heck, even if you’re out of food you’ll just take surviving starving creatures with you. There’s no way to completely fail, but boy are you in a hole when you reach that point. Unless you get super-lucky and feel super-confident with the four cats you happen to have, you’re going to want to deliberately do some single-section runs just to guarantee bringing back some coins and food to start digging your way out. Don’t forget that all your retired cats can be sent off to the various other characters for extra bonuses, so even if you’re burning them on short runs, they’re still proving useful.
You can switch off the film grain
I’m not normally one for turning off grain effects—if they’re there I tend to consider them part of the aesthetic the developer intended for me to experience. But Mewgenics‘ effects are somewhat egregious, and the flickering of its old-timey film projector ways began to really wear on my tired eyes. This can all be tweaked, turned down, or turned off in the game’s settings.
Keep your donkey-faced fuggos in the basement
