In his recent Steam blog post about the current state of Mewgenics, the upcoming cat-breeding turn-based RPG, Edward McMillen spoke frankly on why it’s taking so long for it to come out: he’s trying to avoid another Bumbo and Binding of Isaac: Afterbirth+ situation, given their rough day one state.
“Two of my worst launches,” McMillen claims, explaining that “both launches went wrong because we locked a release date too early then crunched too hard to hit it.” This will not be the case with Mewgenics, he says, as he feels the game is near and dear to him, and wants it to release in as good and polished of a state as possible. Further, even though McMillen says the game is now “roughly 11 months away from being content complete,” this does not mean it’s bound to release in just over a year.
Edward McMillen wants to avoid another Bumbo, Afterbirth+ situation
“Mewgenics is special, easily the game I’m most proud of and a joy to work on,” McMillen said in his blog post on Steam. “Once we are content complete we will nail down a reasonable launch date in early 2025 and announce it, but till then we will continue this song and dance to lay the groundwork on what this game is all about, and give some behind-the-scenes info on the development process.”
The first content drop discussing Mewgenics‘ in-depth gameplay mechanics is included as well, and it touches upon two major features: the story and the game’s custom WMEW 99.9 radio station.
“We often get asked what the hell is the Mewgenics story about? and my honest response is that mewgenics is less about telling a story and more about allowing the player to live in this mewgenics world of boon county and letting their actions in the world and interactions with NPCs slowly form a story,” said McMillen on the former topic.
As for the latter, though, that point has been shown off a bit more concretely, with a short YouTube video demonstrating the kind of emergency reporting and music players ought to expect to hear while they’re mucking about in Mewgenics. The video is featured above, and the really lovely bit is that McMillen got the Binding of Isaac narrator, Matthias Bossi, to narrate some of WMEW’s music introductions. Carl Edge of Fishmasters fame will also be making appearances as Jimmy “The Hammer” Valentine, delivering some of Mewgenics‘ many radio bits.
“There are tons of bits done by Carl, Matthias and many others to really create that illusion of a free form radio show beamed in directly to your game,” McMillen added.
Mewgenics will be coming out on PC sometime down the line, but judging by McMillen’s wording, it’s likely to release sometime in 2025. Depending on how long its polishing phase lasts, however, there’s no guessing when that might be.
