Rock, Paper, Shotgun

By Adam Smith on October 22nd, 2012 at 10:00 am.

Returning from holiday has filled me with anxiety. If I deem the fact that Team Meat are developing a game about cats to be newsworthy, I fear that one of the blustering colonels who make up 42% of RPS’ readership will choke indignantly on his morning brandy and then send me a missive of terrible indignation. “Sir, your recent declaration that the announcement of Team Meat’s Mew-Genics is in any way ‘new’ cuts me to the quick. Captains Grayson, Meer, Rossignol and Walker have all written twenty thousand word dissertations regarding the wider cultural significance of felines, ludology and genetic manipulation. I bid you good day.” Oh, Colonel Breeches, settle your moustaches and just read the announcement below.

Mew-Genics is by far the strangest project I’ve ever worked on.. and that’s saying something. Tommy and I are very happy with how development has been going on it and decided that Mew-Genics will be the next official Team Meat game. We don’t want to spoil too much here, but we can say the game will be randomly generated, strange and involve cats.

The image, with the children standing in the background and the malformed kitty in the foreground, brings Pokemon to my tired mind. Horrific, really, that seeing youngsters surrounding a small and broken animal is a conduit to thoughts of capture and combat. Could it be a tale of cats battling and becoming increasingly dangerous and malformed, much like famous infant tearaway, Isaac? It certainly could. A turn-based battle game with an upgrade and inventory system similar to The Binding of Isaac’s grotesqueries could be pleasing, and the project’s origins in a recent game jam make Ludum Dare’s recent ‘evolution’ theme one possible inspiration.

Or it could be something altogether stranger. Maybe a monstrous update of those Petz games that I definitely never had a bizarre fascination with. Man, I even had Oddballz. You could blow them up and they reformed, like a rubbish T-1000.