{"id":47760,"date":"2026-04-27T10:28:46","date_gmt":"2026-04-27T02:28:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/?p=47760"},"modified":"2026-04-27T10:28:46","modified_gmt":"2026-04-27T02:28:46","slug":"mewgenics-is-a-deeply-violent-game-confronting-an-awful-truth-about-cats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/?p=47760","title":{"rendered":"Mewgenics is a deeply violent game confronting an awful truth about cats"},"content":{"rendered":"


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My cat, Koga, has a white slash across her right eye. I have no idea how she got the scar. What I do know is that, when we first met, she hopped into my lap and looked up at me. No hesitation. Everything that happened before then, out on the mean streets of Brooklyn, is shrouded in mystery.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/section>\n

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Anyone who meets Koga thinks she\u2019s a kitten at first. But no, she\u2019s at least six years old \u2013 maybe older. I have no idea, and the vets don\u2019t either. She\u2019s so small. My best guess is that Koga probably spent some time starving. Even now, many years later, meat has a certain way of making her seem possessed. Whatever actually happened, the truth is that I don\u2019t like thinking about it. She\u2019s the sweetest cat I\u2019ve ever met, and the idea that she spent any time at all suffering \u2013 however brief it might have been \u2013 immediately makes me upset.<\/p>\n

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After playing Mewgenics<\/em>, I started thinking about Koga\u2019s time as a stray differently. Sure, she\u2019s partially blind now. But she\u2019s alive. Out in the real world, most stray cats only survive for a couple of years, if that.<\/p>\n

When you first start playing Mewgenics<\/em>, the brutality of the tactical game is a shock. When you finish a run, chances are high that your felines will lose at least one teammate \u2013 if they come back at all. Mewgenics<\/em> is a roguelike, so this conceit around death shouldn\u2019t be surprising. But I was taken aback by how<\/em> the cats die.<\/p>\n

Your cats don\u2019t just tip over and disappear, as they might in most games. No, in Mewgenics<\/em>, there\u2019s no such thing as a normal death. Your cats explode into tiny chunks. Your cats are eaten whole by disgusting monstrosities. Your cats will become infested from the inside out with pests.<\/p>\n

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\"A\n <\/picture>Image:\u00a0Edmund McMillen, Tyler Glaiel<\/small><\/figure>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

Even the moments leading up to death can be awful. Maybe your tabby loses a limb, or it spends an entire battle bleeding out. Perhaps your calico contracts a deadly disease and spreads it to your entire team, causing you to wipe out completely. There are even psychological effects, like a status that makes your cat lose its mind or flee in fear.<\/p>\n

Like much of Edmund McMillen\u2019s work, the shock factor is played for laughs. It\u2019s a spectacle, almost: when your cat suffers a particularly harsh death, the game plays a gasping audience sound bite. But just like The Binding of Isaac<\/em> or even Super Meat Boy<\/em> before it, behind every childish joke and gross moment is a kernel of vulnerability.<\/p>\n

Despite all the violence, Mewgenics<\/em> is not a game that could have been made by someone who hates cats. A person who revels in the suffering of an animal would not spend countless hours coming up with thousands of possible designs and funny names for them. Someone who hates cats would not take care in recording thousands of voice lines that capture a vast spectrum of possible meows.<\/p>\n

McMillen\u2019s fondness for cats is evident in Mewgenics<\/em>\u2019 smaller moments, too. The way a cat will suddenly burst into an inexplicable chorus of meows. The fact that there are hundreds of possible moves and abilities, like butt scooching and throwing up hairballs, many of which are deeply cat-specific. Betrayals, like when a cat disobeys a command, all come with the same flicker of recognition: this is how a real cat would behave. How clever!<\/p>\n

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\"A\n <\/picture>Image:\u00a0Edmund McMillen, Tyler Glaiel<\/small><\/figure>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

So if Edmund McMillen loves cats so much, why is the world of Mewgenics<\/em> so deeply cruel to these creatures? I\u2019ve spoken to multiple people who tell me that they don\u2019t feel comfortable playing a game like this. These aren\u2019t, like, animal rights activists or something. These are regular people who are unsettled by a fundamentally mean game. I get it. A major reason I\u2019ve been able to stomach Mewgenics<\/em> is because I\u2019m a filthy save scummer who will redo portions of the game whenever something feels egregiously unfair. I do let cats die, but I\u2019m also probably not experiencing McMillen\u2019s intended severity of loss.<\/p>\n

The game isn\u2019t called Mewgenics<\/em> because it expects you to treasure every cat equally. Breeding a powerful cat requires treating your stock like fodder, a means to an end. If you\u2019re really intent on min-maxing, then you also have to get comfortable forcing your cats to inbreed, or throwing them into thunderdome rooms meant to cull out the weak. Why give a cat special treatment when it\u2019s going to die one way or another? There\u2019s always another stray who will come pawing at your door.<\/p>\n

But no matter how viciously Mewgenics<\/em> kills my favorite cats, I know that it doesn\u2019t compare to the things cats in the real world have to endure. The average lifespan of an outdoor cat is only two to five years, or a fraction of what it would be for an indoor cat. It’s certainly magnitudes shorter than the lifespan of your average Mewgenics<\/em> cat. By some estimates, there are somewhere between 60 and 100 million feral cats in the United States alone. Statistics for feral or stray dogs are hard to estimate, but anecdotally, it\u2019s much rarer to see a free-roaming dog in most major American cities. The discrepancy largely comes down to one unfortunate truth: society as a whole doesn\u2019t care about stray cats.<\/p>\n

I mean, can\u2019t cats just handle themselves? Cats are apex predators, the thinking goes; they are designed to hunt and kill. And kill they do, as evidenced by the havoc stray cats inflict on bird populations. Felines are also infamously inscrutable: just ask any owner who has tried to determine where their own pet falls on the grimace scale. Like Mewgenics<\/em>, a stray cat can suffer horrific trauma yet barely let on that anything is wrong. Cats have boundaries, and even the most beloved owner will be refused if those terms are ignored. I say this as someone who owns three cats: it\u2019s much easier for the average person to care about dogs than cats. They\u2019re called man\u2019s best friend for a reason.<\/p>\n

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\"Mewgenics\n <\/picture>Image:\u00a0Edmund McMillen, Tyler Glaiel<\/small><\/figure>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

Popular wisdom might convince people that they don\u2019t need to worry about neighborhood cats, but the reality is much starker. Content warning:<\/strong> the next paragraph contains graphic imagery. <\/em><\/p>\n

For a while, I lived in a part of Brooklyn that acted like a highway for neighborhood cats on their way to their respective colonies. I\u2019ve seen the barbarity firsthand. Cats walking around with shredded paws or oozing wounds. Cats with so many bodily fluids gunking things up, you can\u2019t make out their faces. Cats dragging around organs. Cats limping their way out of a harsh storm. Screeching cats that would wake me up in the middle of the night as they fought one another for kibble. Cats only a few months old, bellies already swollen with kittens, impregnated by their own littermates. Cats who spent an entire lifetime inside with an owner, only to unceremoniously get dumped outside when that person moves to a no-pet apartment.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a lot in Mewgenics<\/em> that is fantastical and impossible. The game\u2019s depiction of cats routinely being fed to the meat grinder is not one of them.<\/p>\n

I wasn\u2019t living in an unusually cat-laden hotbed. My neighborhood had a stray cat problem \u2026 in the way nearly every borough in NYC has a cat problem. The only difference between me and the average New Yorker was that I dared to look at the problem. This isn\u2019t a heroic boast, because in truth there was only so much I could do for any given cat. And more often than not, caring was unbearable. I\u2019d come to know all sorts of beautiful, friendly cats who would visit me daily for months. Inevitably, many of them would disappear without a trace. Every cat I met felt like a heartbreak waiting to happen. Losing cats in Mewgenics<\/em> is tough, but at least you always know exactly what happened.<\/p>\n

Maybe I\u2019ve been desensitized. One of the side effects of dabbling with rescue and TNR cat groups is that algorithms have figured out that I am a softie. I\u2019ve been cursed with the inability to scroll away when I come across an awful account about an internet stranger\u2019s three-month-old kitten getting mauled by dogs. (Then again, just because Mewgenics<\/em> didn\u2019t shake me to my core doesn\u2019t mean I was impervious to the woes of randomly losing a prize cat to some bullshit.)<\/p>\n

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\"Four\n <\/picture>Image: Edmund McMillen\/Tyler Glaiel<\/small><\/figure>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

I don\u2019t know if Edmund McMillen, a man who readily admits he makes provocative games to ensure that people pay attention, intended the game to raise awareness about the experiences of real-world cats. What I do know, beyond the obvious love and care that went into a game that was in development for nearly a decade, is that McMillen could have gone further but chose not to. There\u2019s also nothing in Mewgenics<\/em> that allows the player to directly harm the cats. A game designer who just wants to push people\u2019s buttons with dead cats wouldn\u2019t exercise such restraint.<\/p>\n\n

There\u2019s a segment near the start of Poets Square<\/em>, a memoir by Courtney Gustafson that recounts how she came to be responsible for 30 feral cats, which captures the dilemma poignantly. Though some of her neighbors had lived there for years, all of them believed it was only a few cats who were roaming around the area \u2013 not dozens of them, as Gustafson discovered after moving into a new home.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a difference, Gustafson argues, between the idea that no one wants an animal to suffer and that no one wants to witness an animal suffering. Before she was forced to face the problem literally standing at her door, Gustafson says, it was easier to convince herself she was a good person merely for being averse to animal suffering.<\/p>\n

\u201cFeral, for all the wildness it implies, just means that an animal was abandoned by the system that created it,\u201d Gustafson writes.<\/p>\n

At its worst, the violence at the heart of Mewgenics<\/em> is a dispiriting sucker punch that doesn\u2019t spare even the sturdiest of roguelike players. But in a world where people can\u2019t bring themselves to acknowledge the daily tragedies unfolding in their own backyards, I\u2019m glad that Mewgenics<\/em> doesn\u2019t allow players to look away from the suffering.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n