20 very up and down hours with Mewgenics
A review of a long-awaited tactical game about cat warfare. Plus: PlayStation sales, Roblox results, a Raven complaint, the Baldur’s Gate HBO show and more.
Anyone who plays Mewgenics, an engrossing new PC strategy game from Edmund McMillen (The Binding of Isaac) and Tyler Glaiel (Closure) is going to have a great story about cat combat.
One of mine involves a tense run from a few nights ago, when I brought a quartet of felines into the game’s sewers. I was confident that I could fulfill a strange scientist’s request to carry an item called the persuasion device safely through. But it would be a trial.
Mewgenics adventures play out as a sequence of turn-based battles on square grids, hyper-violent beast-based chess.
Each cat and cat-enemy (bats, slugs, blobs, mice, spiders, spider-cats, etc) is governed by statistical limits to their movement and attack range. Plus, everyone’s got weird abilities, like this one cat of mine, Abel, who wore a top hat for protection and could trigger a “crusade” to make all my cats move toward an enemy.
I entered a part of the sewers where I faced an enemy I’d never seen before: a “daddy shark,” whose info-text informed me he would instantly kill anything in range.
Daddy Shark soon insta-killed Abel and another cat called Horus.
Note: You can usually revive your downed cats if you bring along another cat with the right spell. But, during a persuasion device run, there’s no cat resurrection.
Down to just two cats.
I assumed my final felines would soon die. Might as well slap the big shark on the way out with… wait… it’s called the persuasion device.
Oh right!
One tap and Daddy Shark was now persuaded to fight on my side, which he then did in one suddenly-easy battle after another. He even insta-killed actual boss enemies, because there’s no sub-clause to his powers that said bosses could withstand his jaws.
Watch:
We carried the persuasion device through. Just two cats and one amazing shark. Mission complete.
In another run, I had a cat who could spawn zombie cats for the small cost of some magic points. Early on, he was doing great.
In one cave, I commanded him to spawn some flesh-eating zombie cats. But then he got knocked out by an enemy, and his zombie cats ate their maker.
Whoops. Down to three cats.
Then, a positive twist. My trio found a stray who could do a tiny bit of damage to any creature on the map, every turn. So I started having her hurt one of my other cats each turn, since he had the ability to punch enemies harder every time he took damage. What a pain-and-gain tandem they made!
Every run of Mewgenics has the potential to be like that:
Ridiculous cats
Ridiculous enemies
Ridiculous powers
Ridiculous turns of events
Twenty hours into the game, I kept finding new absurdities, and from what other reviewers have conveyed, I’ve barely seen what the game has to offer. (Mewgenics has 281 achievements; I only have 14)
That is the great part.
I thought the bad part was going to be the game’s sense of humor.
Some of it’s fine. For example: Mewgenics isn’t just about cat combat but cat breeding, which I’ll discuss more in a bit. Cat breeding is depicted as cartoon cats quickly getting it on, which has its own graphical setting. I would advise turning the “humping animations” to “safe” in the game’s settings, because the alternate animations are funnier. A cat draws a pentagram near a second cat to produce a kitten. Two cats just rub their sides together. It’s cute and silly.
Other parts of the game’s humor are just what some might call edgy and I’d call off-putting.
Here are two examples:
But I got used to that. The combat in Mewgenics—the discovery of an ever more remarkable suite of moves and mutations—is an irresistible focal point. The game’s narrative humor is largely relegated to the game’s non-player characters, and, as eye-rolling as some of their jokes are, they’ve got bigger problems.
The core of it, and the reason I have tried to tear myself away from Mewgenics’ great combat gameplay in the last few days, is that the titular part of the game is a drag. This is breeding, the cat eugenics, what that cat-humping is all about.
Mewgenics appears to itself be the progeny of the great 2012 Intelligent Systems tactics game Fire Emblem: Awakening, which lets players unite their best warriors in romances that lead to the births of even better warriors.
Mewgenics is that with cats.
Cat procreation isn’t just an option. It’s essential to the game, as you try to biologically engineer new breeds of cats (hence the pun in the game’s title). You must do this, because each cat quartet that you take on a combat run will, at best, complete the run and then retire. You generally can’t dispatch them on adventures again (so far, I’ve found just one exception to that rule). Your retired cats can hang out in a customizable house, eat food, fight and… hump.
If you furnish the house just right, the kittens that result from feline fornication will inherit their parents’ best stats and powers. Those cats, along with some strays, can go on your next combat runs.
The game’s supporting cast, the craven human (?) weirdos who operate Mewgenics’ shops or just hang out, each have quotas for cat donations. You deal with this between runs, too, ideally to improve your abilities in this phase of the game. Someone wants 10 kittens. Someone else wants 10 dead cats. Another wants cats with mutations. It’s grisly stuff, but also tediously time-consuming.
Cat management in this between-combat mode is a chore. Selecting cats, checking their stats, deciding who to keep, who to donate, who to put in a room with other cats for playing or for breeding all takes a distressing amount of clicks and minutes. (If I had to guess, I spent a couple of hours in this phase across my 20 hours played.)
The stories this phase of the game generates are miserable: I got annoyed selecting and checking each cat, so I impatiently advanced to the next day, only to see one of my best cats become irked, get into a fight and die… I donated cats to the character who said he needed kittens, after spending so many gameplay hours to hit his kitten quota, and got rewarded with some info about cat-breeding that didn’t seem helpful. Progress is slow.
The combat part of Mewgenics is a vacation of constant discovery. It’s wonderful.
The cat-breeding part? It feels like work. I don’t know if I have much more spare time for that.
Item 2: In brief…
🎮 Sony sold eight million PS5s in the Oct-Dec 2025 holiday quarter, down from 9.5 million a year prior (but about a million more consoles than Nintendo’s Switch 2 during the same stretch), per Sony’s latest quarterly report.
The company says it has now sold over 92 million PS5s, a pace that is nearly the same as the PS4.
Sales of PS4 and PS5 games for the quarter reached 97.2 million copies. Most sales were from third-party software, but the company said October’s Ghost of Yotei “exceeded the sales” of its predecessor Ghost of Tsushima “in the same period of time and significantly contributed to the financial results of the quarter.”
👀 Sony’s Guerrilla Games officially revealed the long-expected multiplayer spin-off to his Horizon games. The cartoony Horizon Hunters Gathering is a three-player co-op game involving hunts for mechanized beasts, with a playtest coming soon.
The official PlayStation blog includes a comments section and advises commenters to “be kind, considerate and constructive,” but many of the comments below the announcement haven't quite met those standards.
📈 Roblox reported 144 million daily active users for the Oct-Dec 2025 quarter, up two-thirds from a year ago. Bookings (player spending) reached $2.2 billion, also up about two-thirds.
🪧 A new labor complaint has been filed with the U.S. National Labor Relations Board against Microsoft-owned Call of Duty studio Raven.
The NLRB database indicates the charges were filed on January 23, alleging a violation of the National Labor Relations Act’s 8(a)(5) clause pertaining to “Refusal to Bargain/Bad Faith Bargaining.”
Neither Microsoft nor the Communication Workers of America, which successfully organized QA workers at Raven, provided comment to Game File. Raven QA workers secured a contract with Microsoft last August, after three years of negotiations. During that period, Raven was the subject of now-closed complaints to the NLRB in 2024 and 2025.
😮 Valve has postponed announcing the release date and price for its upcoming Steam Machine living room gaming PCs and Steam Frame VR headset, citing uncertainty over increasing RAM prices (which have been driven up the generative AI industry).
“The limited availability and growing prices of these critical components mean we must revisit our exact shipping schedule and pricing,” the company wrote in a blog post.
Valve said it still plans to release the devices in the first half of 2026.
Bonus Sony-related detail re: the impact of memory chips on its PS5 business. Here’s company CFO Lin Tao to investors on Thursday: “We are already in a position to secure the minimum quantity necessary to manage the year-end selling season of the next fiscal year… We intend to minimize the impact of the increased memory costs on this segment going forward, by prioritizing monetization of the installed base to date and striving to further expand our software and network service revenue.”
📺 HBO is developing a TV series based on the Dungeons & Dragons-based role-playing game series Baldur’s Gate, with Craig Mazin (Chernobyl, The Last of Us) attached as showrunner, Deadline reports.
The plan is for the show to depict what could happen after the events of the 2023 Larian Studios-developed hit Baldur’s Gate III.
On social media, Larian chief Swen Vincke, whose studio is no longer working on Baldur’s Gate games, wrote: “Craig did reach out to ask if he could come over to the studio to speak with us. From the conversation we had, I think he truely is a big fan which gives me hope.”
🐍 Switch 2 ports of Bethesda’s Fallout 4, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered were the headliners of Thursday’s Nintendo Direct showcase focused on third-party games, as Microsoft-owned games gradually make their way to Nintendo’s new hardware.
🚪 Secret Door, the Dreamhaven game studio I wrote about last month, has revealed its new game: Shadowstone is another tactical combat game, but with a rogue-like structure, set in the Sunderfolk fiction.
It’s set for early access launch this year, an approach that won’t surprise those who read the Secret Door piece.
Sunderfolk’s 2.0 update that drops the need on PC to use a phone/tablet as a controller, launches March 10.
Item 3: The week ahead
Tuesday, February 10
Mewgenics (PC) and Crisol: Theater of Idols (PC, PlayStation, Xbox) are released.
Wednesday, February 11
Romeo is a Dead Man (PC, PlayStation, Xbox) is released.
Thursday, February 12
Mario Tennis Fever (Switch 2) and Yakuza Kiwami 3 & Dark Tides (PC, console) are released.
The Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences’ DICE Awards will be held (and aired via IGN at 8pm PT)
Friday, February 13
High on Life 2 (PC, console) and Reanimal (PC, console) are released.
Can only agree with the review, it's my exact experience with the game, to the word