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. "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." Mewgenics review: "The Binding of Isaac collides with Into the Breach in a smart strategy roguelike" You may just see "a turn-based game with cats f****ing" in new strategy game Mewgenics, but led dev says it’s actually "very D&D" I'm not surprised The Binding of Isaac creator's new cat breeding roguelike Mewgenics is the highest-rated game of 2026 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."