Mewgenics

Edmund McMillen and Tyler Glaiel's cat roguelite reached PC on 10 February, and Nicalis brought it to Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S on 8 September of the same year.

Two halves, and the second one is the point

The game divides into an adventure and a house. You send cats out on procedurally generated runs, fight turn-based battles on a grid, and bring whatever is left back to the house where your cats live, breed and age. The adventure half is the tactics game; the house half is where you decide that this generation's best fighter is also the next generation's parent.

Because the two halves feed each other, losing is not a reset. Cats who finish a run retire from adventuring but stay in the house, and what they pass on is genetic: their statistics and mutations join the pool your kittens are drawn from. Their gear is a separate question — the equipment a returning cat was carrying becomes something another cat can pick up rather than something anyone inherits. So a disaster in the field still leaves you with a scarred survivor whose genes are worth working with, which is a far more forgiving structure than the word "roguelite" usually implies.

Combat is a four-cat grid fight

You take four cats into a battle. A cat's class is set by the collar it wears — fighter, tank, mage, hunter and more — and the collars are class-specific, so the outfit is the choice rather than a label you read afterwards. Cats also carry clothing and other kit, and the differences show up in their statistics and mana reserves rather than in a title screen. Each turn a cat can move, use one active ability, and benefit from whatever passive abilities it has picked up.

The battlefield is a procedurally generated grid seen from an isometric angle, and the environment is not decoration. Weather and foliage both affect the fight, and the plants in particular can help or hinder your cats depending on what you do around them, which is exactly the kind of system that makes a tactics game worth replaying rather than solving.

The casualty rules are the part that makes you play carefully. A cat that loses all its hit points is not removed from the battle: it stays on the grid incapacitated and takes a long-term injury, such as a broken paw, that penalises its statistics afterwards. It can be killed outright only by taking three more hits while it is down, and if it dies, the items it was carrying are gone — including rarities that only ever drop once. Finishing a battle levels a random cat, so the survivor who carried the fight and the cat that gets the reward are not necessarily the same animal.

Breeding is the real build

Once you are back at the house, the game becomes a genetics project. Two cats in the same room can mate, and the kitten inherits traits from both parents; the published pitch is that you will breed the perfect army of whiskered warriors across generations. Doing that well means deciding which cats are worth keeping and which are worth giving away, because neighbours will take certain cats off your hands in exchange for items and upgrades.

Inbreeding is possible and is punished, producing offspring with birth defects that carry negative effects. Separately, every cat has a daily chance to develop a mutation, and mutations are not simply good or bad: most trade one statistic for another, while some grant unique effects such as an extra turn or a reroll on a level-up. Cats also age and eventually die, which puts a clock on your best line.

The result is a progression system that is genuinely about lineage rather than numbers. You are not grinding a single favourite up a track; you are trying to build a family whose quirks stack in your favour, and the item the game hands you might matter less than the cat you decide to keep out of the breeding pool.

How it landed

Both of those dates sit in 2026, and the console versions were out and buyable before the end of September rather than merely announced. The game is built to be played solo, which suits a structure where the interesting decisions all happen between battles anyway.

The humour is the divisive part, and that is worth knowing before you buy it for the jokes. It is frequent, deliberately crude, and not for everyone — plenty of the complaints about the game land there. What holds it together regardless is how much sits underneath, because the class and mutation combinations keep producing situations the game clearly did not script. Going in for the systems is the safer bet than going in for the comedy.

Should you play it

Yes, if you like tactics games where the campaign is the roster you build and the loss that hurts is the cat you were counting on. The injury system makes every turn matter, the breeding layer gives the reset a purpose, and the class and mutation combinations keep handing you new things to try.

Skip it if you want a clean run with no consequences, or if you are squeamish about a tactics game that is happy to disable a cat permanently rather than simply kill it. And do not buy it for the jokes unless the studio's sense of humour has already worked for you once before.