Mewgenics has been in various stages of development for well over a decade, and if the early scores are any indication all that dev time has resulted in a uniquely deep strategy RPG. But the devs themselves might've had an easier – and more financially viable – time making a straightforward follow-up to The Binding of Isaac, widely regarded one of the best roguelike games ever made.
"We both hadn't made [a strategy game]," Mewgenics co-creator Edmund McMillen tells GamesRadar+, "and I think we both knew going in it would be really cool to do this, but this is the hardest thing in the world to make. This is very hard, and this is going to take a lot of work. I don't know, we've been doing this for a long time, and I think we were just kind of up to the challenge."
"I've been making games since I was a teenager," McMillen's co-conspirator, Tyler Glaiel, adds, "and I definitely had tried to make RPGs or strategy games when I was younger. They're very difficult to get right because you can't rely on reflexes to balance fights. Reflexes are a very analog thing. You can be like, 'This fight is 2% too difficult, let's slow it down 2%.' You don't get that with a turn-based game because it's very discrete. The actions are very careful and thought out. The systems need to be solid, they need to make sense. There's just a lot that goes into it. A bunch of attempts – I think we both had tried it."
McMillen says he "tried twice" to make a game along these lines before, but those projects were never released. Glaiel estimates his own RPG graveyard contains even more abandoned titles. "I had like four unfinished RPGs that never saw the light of day. It's a very hard one to get right," he says.
But as work on Mewgenics got underway, Glaiel says working in an inherently more ambitious genre started to make sense. "It did feel like we had made a lot of games," he explains, "we learned a lot from all the other games that we had made, individually and together, and then it's like, 'OK, we can try this genre again. It seems like a monumental task, but why shouldn't we be able to do it?'"
"What else are we gonna do?" McMillen muses.
"What else are we gonna do?" Glaiel agrees. "We gonna make another fucking platformer? We gonna make The Binding of Isaac 2?"
"Exactly," McMillen says. "We could have just made The Binding of Isaac 2. That would be very easy."
"That would have gotten 20 million wishlists like one second after announcing," Glaiel reckons.
Check out our full Mewgenics review to find out why it's "a worthy successor to The Binding of Isaac."
