Super Meat Boy. The Binding of Isaac. Designer and artist Edmund McMillen is one of the minds behind some of the most successful indie video games of the past 20 years. You’d think that would provide him some confidence going into his latest game, a deliciously gross but wonderfully fun roguelike tactics game called Mewgenics, which launches on Steam this week.
“I don't know how better to say it,” sighed McMillen during a conversation with Remap a few weeks ahead of the game’s release. “This is the most important thing that I think I've ever done.”
Launching games is a grind and there are no more guarantees. Super Meat Boy was a tremendous game, an era-defining platformer, but it was released in a world where being part of Microsoft’s promoted lineup for its Xbox Live Arcade service was a financial golden ticket.
Will Mewgenics be a success? Probably. But nothing is assured, and failure, both critical and commercially, would be an emotional catastrophe for McMillen.
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“The process of launching a game—being judged, being criticized—and taking it personally, because this is an extension of who I am is, um, awful,” laughed McMillen. “I’ve been hit so many times over the past 20 years and I know how to take a punch, so I'm prepared. It’s still an uncomfortable thing. It’s still a little weird.”
In Mewgenics, players help four scrappy cats survive a series of turn-based fights until they either return home or die trying. If you are familiar with XCOM or Fire Emblem, you get the deal. You move along a grid, spend points to perform actions, etc., etc. The uniqueness of Mewgenics is the wild variance between runs, in which your cats’ abilities will shape, shift, and demand wholly different approaches. Success or failure, you go back home, watch as cats fight or have sex with one another to produce new cats with blended traits, and then head back out again.
It’s a very weird game and there’s a lot of toilet humor.
Conceptually, Mewgenics has been kicking around for nearly 15 years. Announced in 2012 (!!) as a follow-up to Super Meat Boy with his former collaborator, Tommy Refenes, Mewgenics was even demonstrated publicly in playable form before Refenes and McMillen eventually shelved it. The two later split paths, with Refenes focused on the future of Super Meat Boy (Super Meat Boy 3D is due later this year) and McMillen focusing on other projects, like The Binding of Isaac.
What’s arrived 14 years later is a breathtakingly deep tactics game with the trademark love-it-or-hate-it art style and sense of humor that’s defined McMillen’s work for two decades.
What has also defined those past two decades, however, is a publicly vulnerable artist. The moment Mewgenics goes live on Steam is a sense of relief, but also the end of something else.
“I'm the type of person who likes a lot of noise and distraction because being alone in my head is uncomfortable,” said McMillen. “The silence is deafening when a project ends, it's fucking scary. [laughs] I've had some dark moments. After Super Beat Boy, I hit a couple months where I was not feeling good. Gish was a really big one. That was my first one. And I'm trying my best to avoid the drop, and doing a song and dance routine on YouTube has helped.”
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