Team Meat’s Mew-Genics is a cat lady sim

You think your pussy’s clever and so slick?

Following up on 17 weeks of teasing, Edmund McMillen has finally spilled some beans on what the gameplay of Team Meat’s latest project, Mew-Genics, will actually consist of. Up until now, we knew there were cats and that they would do things which cats do, but it turns out that the game is essentially a simulator of keeping cats in a home. That’s probably a pretty reductive description of it, based on some of what Edmund describes.

Rather than go into the specifics of how all of this works, McMillen opted to describe a segment of play in a first-person narrative, in which he relays his efforts to breed a cat with a special tail which helped to win an award in the hopes that its offspring will share the trait. This is at first waylaid by an unacceptable mate and then dubbed a failure through narcolepsy inherited from the next attempt.

So, cat breeding and interaction, with the goal of creating an environment which feels alive and can create its own narratives. It sounds ambitious and the number of possible cat combinations (from appearance elements to individual statistics) are astronomical, according to McMillen. I’m sure we’ll be learning about all kinds of facets to it as it works toward release on PC, iOS and Android.

I’m on board, and I know how the rest of the internet feels about cats, so this seems like a formula for commercial success if I’ve ever seen one. The 2D side-view perspective of the house reminded me of one of the early forefathers of The Sims, a 1985 Activision title called Little Computer People, which has always held a special place in my heart. I’m sure that nostalgic association is doing as much to inspire me to play this as the warm ball of kitty sitting in my lap as I write this.

Mew-Genics! Official announcement on gameplay! [Edmund McMillen’s Blog]