The Morality of Mewgenics
The Cost of Doing Business
To play Mewgenics is to be complicit in its world. Despite some truly excellent gameplay, the Mewgenics world is not a nice place, and your role in that world is equally hideous. Your job is to cram as many cats as able into a small house, breed them like some form of vile breeding farm and then send the offspring into battle against increasingly otherworldly horrors.
It’s obvious from the title itself, a pun on eugenics, that breeding for maximum efficiency is the most valuable commodity – sired kittens’ real purpose is to be fit for battle, either through selective breeding or put into rooms to fight other cats to force them to be battle-ready. Mutated, victorious in battle against others or killed trying. Edmund McMillen is no stranger to sick, macabre machinations, through games like The Binding of Isaac and Super Meat Boy. In the latter, you play as a boy with no skin trying to save your girlfriend against an intelligent fetus, and in the former, you play as a boy who is sent into the pits of hell after his mother gets a vision from God. To play Edmund McMillen’s games, you have to either not think about the themes or put your own morals aside.
Spoilers for Mewgenics ahead.
I’ll gloss over sending your cats into battle to complete objectives. We all know that animal fighting rings are bad. Instead, let’s talk about the house. Random cats will turn up at your house every day, which will be brought into the fold for one purpose or another. The rooms in your house are ideally organised by stats: appeal, comfort, stimulation, health, and mutation. For rooms like what I called “The Dud Room” is where you send everything that doesn’t meet your current needs. Maybe it’s a stray with bad stats, maybe it’s a kitten who didn’t inherit the best stats from its parents. This room will have low comfort because it becomes a fight club. Cats fight each other, maybe they get good enough to be useful, maybe they die. As I said, you have to be complicit in the world to play the game. This room might also have high mutations, to encourage cats becoming slightly hideous abominations: camel humps, human heads, no mouths, antlers. Worse still, when those mutations provide positive benefits, you might breed them into the ‘prime line’ of your cats, encouraging offspring to also share this fate.
The cats in the fight club are just one facet, though. To keep your bloodline pure and decently competent for combat, we’re going ancient Egyptian-style. You can’t breed cats with siblings or parents, which might make them too inbred and decrease their efficiency. No, instead I set up a round robin process called “bone your uncle”. This keeps cats a bit inbred, but not so much that it becomes a problem and introduces birth defects. This world is not a happy place, and animals are not exempt from this unhappiness.
Unfortunately, even returning from a successful mission won’t make your cats live a happy life in the pastures upstate. Retired cats are used for either defending the house against boss attacks, are brought back in for breeding stock or are sent to one of the denizens of the world to give you benefits.
These people are not good people – but again, you’re complicit. Maybe you’ll send cats with injuries, parasites or birth defects off to the ‘good doctor’, Dr Beanies. He’s probably the worst human in the game. He experiments on the cats, he dumps his experiments down a chute willy-nilly, and has been known to do a little human experimentation on the side. He also shows a stunning lack of self-reflection, instead blaming you when things go awry.
Butch is a better option. He takes cats who have been in specific maps. He trains them up and is the trainer behind all of the ‘class’ boss cats in Act 1, as well as the monstrous Guillotina. He’s the best option, as it’s never explicitly said what happens to the cats, just that he likes to have a lot around to fill the hole in his heart he has from his family situation.
Tink is also a decent option. Tink takes kittens and only accepts “no uggos”. He has a staunch pageant vibe and, in a lot of ways, reminds me of the phenomenon of people adopting kittens/puppies, only to get rid of them when they’re older, not deemed as ‘cute’ and require more work. That situation sucks, but I have a soft spot for Tink as he loves his wife and has some very funny lines.
Then there’s Frank. Frank gives massive vibes of someone who’s going through some form of withdrawal. He only wants retired cats, maybe because he says he’s also retired. It doesn’t say what he actually does with them, but here’s to hoping it’s good things. Frank also has a growth on his head that acts a bit like a parasite and has a mind of its own, finally leaving Frank’s dead body for another host late into the game.
Now we’re getting into the weeds. The previous people I consider to be saints in comparison to those up ahead. Let’s start with Baby Jack. Baby Jack wants injured cats, as he believes “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”. It’s stated that any cats you send him will be injured further by him to make them stronger, in his eyes. Edmund was especially unkind here, as most people are staunchly against animal cruelty, but he has the best rewards in the game: furniture. Good furniture makes your house really work, so it’s hard not to level him up by sending him lots of cats for rewards.
Organ Grinder, who takes the player’s Steam name, only wants dead cats. At least they’re dead, as it’s not described what happens to them. He actively accuses the player of purposefully killing cats to get in his good graces, even if he’s not opposed to you doing so.
Out of all the characters, the one that makes me laugh is Tracy. She wants old cats only, and claims she’s an animal advocate. PETA gave Edmund McMillen an award for being a Hero to Animals. She admonishes the player for their foul treatment of animals (rightfully so!), and only calls animals “animal companions” instead of “pets”. On the surface, she seems like an upstanding person in the unjust Boon County. It’s all a bit of a ruse, though, as the company she works for (P Mart) is actually turning those old cats into cat food, and then selling it back to you. Pretty messed up, and heavily ironic.
Finally, the player. Late game, it’s revealed you’re actually the reanimated corpse of MOM from The Binding of Isaac, the very person who had an abusive relationship with her son. It’s implied you’re brainwashed, so at least you have some semblance of having clean hands in this whole loathsome series of events. Maybe it’s comeuppance, though, for doing abhorrent things in the past. You do have some control over the final narrative, but ultimately, any actions you take in rebellion against the Doctor are in vain.
Mewgenics requires you to either be okay with the world or blissfully unaware of the thematic implications of what you’re doing. I’m an animal lover, so there are times it’s been hard to do some of the actions the game wants from me. That’s the beauty, though. McMillen isn’t only doing this to be repugnant or topical; it feels like it’s purposefully confronting. Reflecting on the awful nature of Boon County is part of the game, and the game’s just so damn good the whole time it’s egging you on. Sure, you’re doing awful things and are part of the awful system, but isn’t the gameplay fun?
