It won’t surprise anyone who’s followed his career that the next game from Super Meat Boy and The Binding of Isaac creator Edmund McMillen contains some likely-to-be-controversial elements. Its title is Mewgenics, a play on “eugenics,” so there’s one right off the bat.
The idea for Mewgenics, which is about breeding successive generations of cats and sending them on adventures with turn-based battles, came first from the observation that it’s kind of messed up that we selectively breed animals until we think they’re cute or useful.
But Mewgenics also gets into the much thornier topic of human genetics and actual, non-mew eugenics by including human conditions like autism and dyslexia as things your cats can inherit. I recently spoke to McMillen and collaborator Tyler Glaiel about the game, and asked them what they intended by confronting players with the uncomfortable option to, say, not allow a cat with autism or another hereditary condition to mate.
McMillen says that he wants players to grapple with that question and come to the realization that, although such conditions have downsides, they are not just debuffs. Cats with autism, for instance, are exceptionally good at casting spells they’re born with.
McMillen himself has dyslexia, and in Mewgenics, the condition swaps sixes/nines and fives/threes in damage numbers and ability costs. That could be very powerful, but it’ll take some effort to make the most of it.
Primordial dwarfism is a very rare condition in Mewgenics, and cats born with it will be “teeny, teeny, teeny, tiny” and have reduced stats, but a huge amount of luck.
“So you got, like, the luckiest fucking cat imaginable, like off the charts lucky, and you can abuse the fuck out of that,” McMillen said. “You can make that work for you in amazing, amazing ways. And we try to do that as much as possible, because I like the idea of somebody viewing something as a downside and just seeing the downside, but then being like, ‘Wait a minute, I can make this work.’ And then they make it work. And that’s what this game is about: It’s about making it work, what you’re given. You’ve been given this hand, make it work.”
Mewgenics may have started with the thought that cat breeding is pretty weird, but McMillen is now a father, and says the game is about “having kids, and legacy, and passing down genetic traits, and praying that whatever foundation you left there will be used in the future.”
He says fans have been pitching him and Glaiel ideas for how to represent their own conditions in Mewgenics, excited by the opportunity to perhaps in some small way be understood through the lens of turn-based tactical cat combat.
If there were any doubt about their intentions, Glaiel told me that Mewgenics is “very much not a pro-eugenics game,” laughing and pointing out that The Binding of Isaac is about child abuse, but is definitely not pro-child abuse.
More about Mewgenics’ themes will be revealed in its story, Glaiel says, which I was surprised to hear he expects to take 200 hours for a novice player to complete. (He thinks he could speedrun it in about 50.)
Mewgenics is set to release February 10, 2026 on Steam. McMillen thinks it’s his best game yet, and after a day talking with him and Glaiel and trying the game, I’m inclined to trust his judgment.