The hottest roguelike of 2026 Mewgenics might also be one of the meanest, since developers Edmund McMillen and Tyler Glaiel responded to players' complaints of a difficult tutorial boss with murder, murder, and more murder.
Glaiel – who's previously collaborated with McMillen on several cult-hit games, including The End is Nigh in 2017 – explains in a February 19 post on Twitter. He frames it as a "fun little tidbit about the Mewgenics tutorial" before telling a tale full of caprice and malice.
"First iteration of the tutorial had Pebbles' Boulder Drop do 50 damage. There was usually a visceral negative reaction to this, 'that seems unfair,'" Glaiel recalls about Mewgenics' tutorial boss Pebbles, a mechanical cat that's an expert in chucking boulders. So, in response to players' complaints, Glaiel helped make Pebbles even more of a rock monster.
"Changing it to 999 fixed the problem entirely as that reads as 'scripted death,'" he explains. Indeed, in its current form, Pebbles' boss fight is guaranteed to obliterate one of your kitty characters with the unavoidable Boulder Drop attack. Though, after Pebbles unleashes his big rock, your surviving cat still has a chance to fight back against the enemy Pebbles and revive its friend, too. In that sense, McMillen and Glaiel turning up Pebbles' damage output isn't as truly evil as I've made it out to be as it is just plain rude to your KO'd cat.
But that's the brutal nature of Mewgenics. "It's obvious in retrospect," Glaiel says, "but we did spend some time trying to get the number lower but still be a guaranteed kill before figuring that out."
