Disclaimer: I did not finish Mewgenics. I dropped it after completing act 1, which took roughly 12 hours of play.
I love tactics games. Some days I think it's my favorite genre. Into the Breach in particular is on the short list of games I would consider calling my favorite game. So I was excited to check out Mewgenics, a roguelike tactics game with strong early reception and word of mouth. Unfortunately, despite having some neat ideas and perfectly solid tactics gameplay, I did not enjoy Mewgenics enough to stick with the long grind it demands.
In Mewgenics, at the whims of an eccentric and incompetent scientist, you are directed to send cats on adventures and breed them, in an effort to make them stronger. This plays out in a cycle of roguelike runs with squads of up to four cats, and breeding in between runs. Each run consists of a series of turn-based tactical battles and other events that result in a variety of outcomes. Cats are differentiated by a list of stats, and you also select a class for each cat at the beginning of a run that augment them even more. These come in standard varieties, such as a fighter, hunter, mage, tank, cleric, and so on. It seems like a lot of choices at first, but the most straightforward pairings are hard to beat: if a cat has high strength but low intelligence, then they're going to make a good fighter and a poor mage. The classes behave as you'd expect for each archetype, and in my time with the game, the classic DPS-tank-healer combination worked as well or better than anything else. There's nothing hugely wrong with that, and there may be some fun things you could do with some unorthodox class combinations. But for me, the less I thought about my initial run setup and went with the obvious choices, the better the run went.
You do unlock additional classes over time, and I hope those shake things up as the game continues. During my time with Mewgenics, my runs quickly began to feel very similar to each other. Having a tank and cleric on hand was always useful, and I often complimented that core with a pair of DPS classes. I won all but one run handily, the exception being the one time I went with a non-standard class combination (some poor RNG didn't help either). The upgrades and gear I saw during my runs didn't do much to shake things up either. The gear largely consists of standard buffs, as do many of the level up rewards. You do get to chose new abilities for cats as they level up, and some of these can be fun to play with; I was able to stack some bleed-inflicting abilities on a thief, for example. But most of the time my cats became better versions of the classes they already were. I had one run where my tank became nearly invincible while dealing good retaliate damage, and another run where my mage's basic attack grew significantly in damage the longer the battle went on. It is fun to feel that sense of increasing power, but it doesn't do much to make runs feel distinct.
Despite my gripes, I do want to clarify that the underlying tactics gameplay in Mewgenics is perfectly good; this is not a bad tactics game. I didn't find it to be a particularly novel or compelling one either. That's brings us to Mewgenics primary differentiating mechanic: breeding. Once a cat has gone on a run (regardless of whether it's a successful run or not), it is retired and cannot venture out again. Therefore, you need more cats. Between runs you can spend time at home, advancing days as much as you please (and have food for), and the cats in your house may procreate at night. This is how you get more cats for the grind, and cats can pass down some of their traits to their children. In theory, it could be fun to genetically engineer cats to have specific traits for specific builds. But in my time with the game, I wasn't granted much agency over this process. You can't force specific cats to mate, and you can't choose what traits get passed down; RNG makes most of the decisions here. There is also a surprising lack of information and resources to help you make what decisions you are afforded. An early example is that the scientist tells you that inbreeding is bad (of course), but you have no way of identifying which cats are related. You also don't have many rooms to separate cats at the beginning, which is the only tool I had to avoid inbreeding anyway. My guess is that it's intentional to limit the player's influence over breeding early on, before opening up more avenues later. Regardless, I didn't have any meaningful way to influence breeding throughout my 12 hours of play.
Instead, breeding feels like a vessel for Mewgenic's massive grind. In addition to simply needing new cats to go on new runs, you also need to donate cats to various people around town to unlock important persistent upgrades back at home. Each person offers different services -- one increases your storage size, one has a shop to upgrade for new items, one adds rooms your house, etc. -- and each has different criteria for the cats they will accept -- one only takes retired cats, one only accepts babies, one only wants old cats, etc. These cat requirements become very steep very quickly, which means you will need to spend many runs and many nights of breeding to obtain these upgrades. Simply lowering the cat requirements, or giving the player a few of the key upgrades earlier, would have done a lot for my interest in sticking with Mewgenics. But as it stands, it's hard for me to justify spending dozens more hours on a game with progression this slow. The combination of not having key features early on, runs feeling similar, and the runs being long (upwards of two hours on average) left me with none of that "one more run" itch that most roguelikes I enjoy instill.
At its best, Mewgenics is a perfectly fine roguelike tactics game, and potentially a better one if you're up for a slow start with a long grind. The tactics gameplay is standard but works well, and can make for fun encounters, especially when a powerful build manages to come together. Yet for me, as the grind and repetition set in, I quickly lost interest, which leaves me feeling bummed out about a game that is otherwise good. I think that grind will be the biggest point to consider for anyone looking to play Mewgenics, too.