Mewgenics Switch 2 review

Edmund McMillen and Tyler Glaiel’s cat breeding tactics game was announced in 2012, a whopping 14 years ago! In fact, it was declared dead in 2016 and then brought back to life in 2018 after McMillen acquired full ownership of the IP following his departure from Team Meat. Mewgenics released in February earlier this year on PC and immediately sold a million copies within the first week! Now, Nicalis has brought the vision onto consoles seven months later, with a full-cartridge physical edition to release on Switch 2 in early 2027.

At its core, Mewgenics is a tactical turn-based roguelike game combined with a complex cat breeding simulator. You spend your time between grid-based combat and managing a house full of felines. You play a cat lady who is jolted back to life in the opening seconds by Dr. Thomas A. Beanies, a scientist whose interest in cats is a bit odd. He gives you a filthy house in Boon County, a dying stretch of rural America, and asks you to breed cats. 

The plot thickens across 3 separate acts, starting from back alleys and sewers all the way into the earth’s core, the moon, and even the end of time itself. Separate credits roll depending on how far you push. McMillen actually features direct ties and references to his previous works, including The Binding of Isaac, so long-time fans are in for a treat that expands the shared universe’s lore.

If you weren’t into Isaac’s vibe in terms of visuals and humor, then Mewgenics might not win you over either. Humor in Mewgenics is an acquired taste, often resorting to teenage antics like toilet comedy and juvenile talk. There are fart jokes and poop monsters, with the overall artwork coming off as dirty and unsettling. Because you are breeding cats, expect to see deformities and messed-up anomalies! Some designs are grotesque past the point of fun, which is clearly the intent and clearly not for everyone. That being said, the developers did include a "Safe" toggle in the menu that replaces humping animations with wholesome alternatives. 

As I mentioned earlier, the game is actually sort of like a two-in-one. The first is a turn-based tactics game where you choose up to four cats, strap collars on them, and pick your way across a branching map of fights, shops, and random events. It’s sort of like Slay the Spire in terms of how each run is played. The collars are the classes, with 5 (Fighter, Hunter, Mage, Tank, Collarless) available at the start and a total of 14 by the time you hit endgame. Each one changes stat modifiers and opens up different abilities you can choose for your cats mid-run.

Turn order is individual and driven by speed rather than fixed, so a fast Thief acts before the enemy, while a slow Tank will probably always go last. Attacks are directional and terrain matters, which is where the tactics part of the game comes in. Once you get used to the different enemy types and learn the vocabulary, combat starts being math you can map out in your head naturally.

The second part of the game happens at home, where your family of felines eats, brawls, fights, gets sick, and dies. You breed pairs each night, and their kittens inherit stats, traits, mutations, and disorders, some of which are permanent. For example, if you breed two high-Intellect cats in a highly stimulated room, you can get a kitten with maximum starting mana to cast massive spells on turn one! However, this also requires strategy, because if you breed random stuff without thinking, you can get inbred disasters!

While I do commend how much depth Mewgenics has, I can’t help but feel frustrated with the interface and overall user experience. There aren’t any meaningful filters, sorting tools, or comparisons, so once you have a full house of bizarre cats, that means you have to click on each one individually. The Switch 2 port also comes with a mouse cursor, which you’d normally expect to see on the PC version, which makes the navigation sort of clunky and slow.

Once you finish a run successfully, your team of cats retires permanently, so you can’t bring them on another run. This sounds sort of bad, but you have to realize that they become breeding stock for a new generation of even better cats, which is the whole gameplay loop. Progress comes through donations, where you feed cats to your neighbors and vendors to unlock storage and furniture that ups your odds for breeding certain qualities. You’ll also get new shops and collars after you clear each area. Meta-progression is quite slow, and there are definitely stretches where the game feels stagnant. 

A completionist run can easily run you hundreds of hours, as there are over a thousand abilities, hundreds of items, and a massive achievement list. Acts 2 and 3 are gated behind specific quest items, which means you need to stray a bit off the main path to get to them. Higher difficulties unlock later on, and house bosses can be resummoned. The true ending requires clearing secret areas across all 3 acts, beating the Creator once, then assembling the tools to do it properly. A first DLC adding 4 more classes is already confirmed.

Mewgenics takes up a cozy 6.2 GB on the Nintendo Switch 2. It’s with great pleasure that I say that load times are near instantaneous, both from the Switch home menu to the title screen as well as loading into the actual game itself. Technical performance holds up well in docked mode, with options for both Original and Controller style inputs that lock the mouse cursor. The cursor movement itself can be hit or miss, since the game won’t allow you to toggle that sensitivity. 

To be honest, playing handheld feels better and more intuitive as the touch-screen input works wonders instead of the cursor. Touch works beautifully, since poking a grid tile directly beats nudging a cursor across it, and you can switch the touchscreen off if you would rather not smear the display. Joy-Con 2 mouse support is here too if you prefer that. Overall, this is a fantastic port.

Something that other developers need to take note of is cross-save! If you started playing Mewgenics on PC in February, you can port your progress over, so you don’t have to start from scratch. And given this is the perfect on-the-go game, this is a massive win for Switch 2 players.

Ridiculon's soundtrack is the best thing in the game and one of the best this year. Matthias Bossi and Jon Evans crafted over 80 tracks, brought in a rotating cast of guest vocalists, and then hid a lot of it on an in-house radio station called WMEW 99.9 that plays in-game. These folks are McMillen’s long-term musical collaborators, who also created the soundtracks for The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth.