This has slowly but steadily become my favorite game of all time in terms of pure gameplay and game design.

I really like JRPGs and tactical RPGs, with old-school Final Fantasy and Persona games being some of my favorites. But there’s always that one thing that usually drags them down: the grind. Whether it’s a super hard boss fight or some powerful weapon you want, you often have to grind low-level enemies for hours just to make it through.

Mewgenics does away with all of that. You choose your classes at the start, and your cats’ abilities become randomized when you begin a run. This can seem annoying at first when you get bad skills, but the more you play and the more abilities you unlock, the more these “bad” abilities can become surprisingly good when combined with others. For example, I had a skill where if an enemy takes down an ally, they take 10 damage themselves. Combining this with a skill that spawns 1 HP ally flies… well, you can see where this is going.

After each battle, one of your cats levels up, so the progression never drags and the game stays fast-paced and exciting all the way through. Items are randomized too, and you really have to adapt and combine them with your skills to get the most out of them.

It’s amazing what kind of stories and memories this game can create when it basically has no real story or deeply written characters. You can start with awful cats that get trampled by enemies, but by the end of the run, your weakest cat has become a squirrel-summoning demigod. What I love most about this game is that even builds that don’t seem very strong at first can become something incredible when paired with the right passive skills.

I was playing with a friend the other day, and we had a six-hour run. Our run started with terrible cats that had almost no HP and dealt very little damage. My friend started taking weird passive skills just to mess around, when suddenly one of our cats inhaled all the consumables from the arena and became an unstoppable force. Then that same cat died during the level 2 boss fight, and we were devastated — almost ready to give up. But then a new level 0 cat joined our team, and that cat ended up becoming the squirrel-summoning demigod I mentioned earlier.

Our run ended miserably. We died at the final area boss because our cats had such low damage output. But the following day, I took what I had learned from that run and beat the boss within two hours.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that this game constantly surprises you and creates its own unique stories and adventures. It does all of this without any dialogue or a proper story to speak of, which is quite an achievement if you ask me.

Amazing and expressive art, dark twisted humor, deep gameplay mechanics, and surprisingly memorable stories that stay with you long after you stop playing. What more could you really ask for from a game?