An upcoming tactical RPG called Mewgenics promises to add some grit and intentionally disturbing flair to the tactical RPG scene, and there’s reason to believe it will deliver. The game, which comes from Binding of Isaac developer Edmund McMillen, in collaboration with Tyler Glaiel, is slated for a February 2026 release, and is about what one would expect from this irreverent and subversive duo.
McMillen and Glaiel previously co-developed 2017’s The End Is Nigh.
As one might expect from a McMillen game (and as indicated by its intentionally bizarre title), Mewgenics is quite an odd, unapologetically dark project. It’s a game split into two main sections: combat encounters and cat-breeding. The former of these two gameplay pillars purports to be akin to games like Final Fantasy Tactics and Into the Breach, being turn-based and on an isometric grid, while the latter is far more unsettling and on-brand for McMillen. So, what exactly can Steam audiences expect from the crude and off-putting Mewgenics, which McMillen himself once described as the strangest game he has ever worked on?
What’s Mewgenics All About, Anyway?
Build the ultimate cat army through tactical breeding and send them into deep, challenging turn-based adventures. Draft abilities, collect items, and manipulate genetics across generations…
If you take a look at Mewgenics‘ turn-based gameplay, and try to ignore the cute-and-terrifying design of the game’s characters, you’ll find a TRPG fairly in line with its contemporaries. Grid-based isometric battles reward smart positioning, party composition, and forethought; like so many other TRPGs, manipulation of player and NPC location is paramount for success—it’s about much more than choosing the right attack and support moves.
Where Mewgenics departs from other TRPGs is through its long-term progression and RPG elements. Building upon the common genre trope of persistent party member death (seen in everything from Baldur’s Gate 3 to Fights in Tight Places), Mewgenics introduces long-term character effects such as brain damage and mutations, the latter of which can be passed down to a character’s offspring. This is where the second portion of the Mewgenics equation comes into play.
Mewgenics’ Cat-Breeding Systems Explained
The cat-breeding mechanics are where Mewgenics is its most unique, and arguably its most McMillenesque. Between runs, players’ cats will return to a house hub that contains all the cats they have collected (only four cats can embark on a run at once). Placing two cats in the same room of this house will allow them to mate, and eventually produce offspring that inherit the traits of the parents. As previously mentioned, these traits are informed by how cats change during runs, via mutations and upgrades.
Cat-breeding is the backbone of Mewgenics‘ base-building and favor-based progression, both of which unfold between runs. As a player’s cat population increases, it will require more food to sustain itself, resulting in a resource-management situation. Since newly bred cats will inherit traits from both parents, it’s often beneficial to breed cats aggressively and obtain rarer or strategic cat types. From there, unwanted cats can be sent to NPCs in the hub area in exchange for certain benefits, like an increase in inventory size or housing capacity. The way this favor system is described, it sounds a bit like a Persona-style bond formula, developed through cat-trading.
But as you might have expected, things get more complicated than that. In various Steam blog posts, McMillen outlines some of the more avant-garde and complex dimensions of cat-breeding, such as the various disorders that can be passed down to offspring, as well as the consequences of inbreeding. One interesting bit of trivia is that McMillen derived the inbreeding systems from a research paper in the Journal of Heredity about calculating the Coefficient of Inbreeding. This due diligence might be a good indication of how robust and multilayered Mewgenics‘ cat-breeding mechanics will be in the final product.
You’ll Be Able to Sink North of 200 Hours into Mewgenics
The incredible variety that Mewgenics will reportedly offer through cat-breeding is enough to provide substantial replay value, but McMillen and Glaiel claim that the game will be even more content-rich than that. Indeed, the Mewgenics Steam page boasts that it will have a main campaign spanning over 200 hours, alongside some other tantalizing quick-figures:
- 10+ character classes with 75 unique abilities each
- 900+ wild items
- 200+ enemies and bosses
- Roguelite progression: never experience the same game twice.
- Choices at every turn. Money! Items!! And genes!! All matters.
Like The Binding of Isaac before it, Mewgenics seems to be leaning heavily into a premise of immeasurable build variety, but with more persistent, cross-run progression. The abundance of different items, enemies, and character abilities, coupled with procedural generation and randomized roguelike systems, certainly paint a picture of a deep, beefy gaming experience. And with the off-beat charm and endlessly surprising narrative and gameplay design that McMillen and Glaiel have become known for, there’s every reason to be optimistic about Mewgenics‘ chances in the busy landscape of 2026 gaming.
