Team Meat, the development team behind popular indie title Super Meat Boy have finally shed light on their newest game Mew-Genics. The developers have dubbed it a "cat-lady sim" and said "It will blend elements of The Sims and Pokemon with a sprinkling of Animal Crossing and a dash of Tamagotchi." So this sounds cute and innocent right? Maybe Team Meat have left behind the dark humour for this project? Well not really. The game involves you the player looking after an increasing number of cats, just like regular cats the felines in your game will breed and will pass on the traits of the parents to their kittens. As well as the genetic traits the psychological traits will also be passed to the next generation and will cause the cats to react differently to certain events that happen in the game. This sounds like an interesting idea and McMillien gives a detailed account of what it could lead too.
"Last week I was playing a game with Puddle, a fat female cat I had been working on earlier that day, I thawed her out of her Cryo-cube and placed her in my current single story house along with her newly generated companion Champ. I had been focusing my time on Puddle due to the fact that she seemed to have a very unique tail that I believe had helped her place 2nd in a cat pageant in a previous and I needed to breed her so I could continue her bloodline before she got too old. Sadly Champ wasn't up to snuff and Puddle made this obvious by repeatedly kicking him in the face, I separated them quickly by putting champ in the attic but when I tried to feed him.. something odd happened. See, Champ was a dullard and when Puddle kicked him he just happened to also be eating and now associated the trauma with food instead of Puddle herself, he was scared of all food.. and sadly died in the attic shortly after."
The story only gets worse as McMillen adopts a stray cat called Goon who goes on to infect Puddle with "Feline AIDS". Puddle is put into cryo-statis while a cure is sought out and Goon attacks his own kittens and runs away, this leada to McMillen being arrested by animal-control before a cure is found for Puddle leading to her eventual death. Although this sounds grim there is a variety of interesting game play elements at work here and I for one am looking forward to seeing how this all turns out. Mew-Genics will be released on Steam, iOS and Android with no current release date announced.