Mewgenics is, at long last, a worthy successor to The Binding Of Isaac

At the heart of all this chaos is the same design principle that made Isaac compelling across more than a thousand hours of gameplay: The idea that interesting decisions happen when players are forced to work with, and mitigate, randomness in service of breaking a game over their knee. This is the purest pleasure of Mewgenics, once you boil away its other layers (including an extremely hook-y progression system that cannily encourages the player to take on risky missions): Fielding a new team of cats, looking over their abilities, and then figuring out how they (and your equipment, and the stat and ability choices you get every time you level up) can synergize to create something that is both stupid, and stupidly powerful. In the same way that McMillen and Glaiel are not afraid to allow players to completely screw themselves over, they’re unafraid of—and, in fact, giddily support—those moments when you realize “Wait, if those two abilities go off in sequence, then… I can kill everything.” These moments consistently feel amazing, and Mewgenics is, in large part, a machine built to create them.

In case it sounds like I’m gushing aimlessly, like an animated cat with a suppurating head wound (apologies, playing this game too much starts you thinking in those kinds of terms), I should make it clear that I don’t love everything about Mewgenics. Although 15 years of playing Isaac have largely inured me to McMillen’s love of poop, pee, and fart jokes, the addition of both higher-resolution graphics and text to his arsenal are not going to make the game an easier sell to many people I know who would otherwise love it. (The music, as always, is impeccable, though, with a clever touch that sees the song you’ve been hearing throughout the level suddenly develop lyrics once you reach the area boss.) On a more fundamental level, the game sometimes struggles with clarity: Although the vast majority of status effects, enemy and unit stats, and other things that determine the game’s logic are clearly spelled out, every once in a while I’ve run into interactions or vaguely worded effects that screwed me in ways I didn’t expect—generating a much nastier variety of “fuck you.” (You can technically reset battles to try again, but only if you don’t mind getting an increasing sequence of run-ruining penalties delivered via an extended Animal Crossing reference.) The “cat breeding” mechanic feels like an afterthought (or maybe a beforethought, given how much it seems like an artifact of the game’s long and misadventure-filled development.) And, on a more emotionally honest note, it never feels good, in the moment, to find yourself trapped in a no-win situation, playing out the consequences of your past choices—no matter how fundamental that possibility of failure is to everything the game does so well.

Will Mewgenics catch on in the ridiculously successful way that Isaac did, defining a whole era of independent video game development? It seems impossible—in part because the game is being released into the world that Isaac created. (It’s also quite a bit more complicated, and less immediately “pick up and play,” than the earlier game, which feels like it will make it harder to evangelize.) But it is, undeniably, McMillen’s best game in more than a decade: Incredibly deep, immensely satisfying, and with a huge labyrinth of secrets lurking under its initially simple offerings. You just have to wade through a whole lot of dead cats—and a fair amount of “fuck you”s—to get there.