Two of Mewgenics’ most memorable areas were directly inspired by a brutal and brilliant tabletop RPG

Easily the biggest influence on how I’ve run tabletop RPG campaigns over the last few years has been the OSR movement. Short for Old School Renaissance (or Old School Revival, depending on who you ask), it’s a subgenre of games that look back on the origins of D&D and bring forward ideas that had become unpopular in the modern hobby—such as lethal dungeons, morally grey heroes, and an emphasis on player problem-solving over stats and rolls.

Apparently it’s also been a big influence on the best game of the year so far, Mewgenics—with one specific element having inspired two of the game’s most memorable areas.

Edmund McMillen has previously mentioned the OSR TTRPG Dungeon Crawl Classics being a touchstone during development, and co-developer Tyler Glaiel has gotten a little more specific on his X account. “The Desert and The Lab are both kind of intended to act like a level 0 funnel,” he says.

What’s a level 0 funnel, you might ask? It’s a particular style of adventure design created for Dungeon Crawl Classics, and it bears a little explanation.

DCC deliberately takes a lot of OSR ideas to their extremes, for a ‘gonzo’ feel, and in particular it dials up the lethality for early characters. An important part of that is that you don’t start with a level 1 character like you would in other D&D-derived systems.

Instead, you start with four level 0 characters—randomly-generated adventurers so green they don’t even have a proper class yet—and then send them into a brutally difficult dungeon for their first adventure. This is a ‘funnel’, because as these fledgling heroes are killed off one-by-one by traps and monsters, you’re filtering down to the one strongest and/or luckiest hero in your stable. If that one can make it out alive, they get promoted to level 1 and choose a class, having truly earned their place in an adventuring party.

Though not quite as harsh, the Desert and the Lab are designed to serve a similar function in Mewgenics. Via the Desert’s heat mechanics, which limit your healing, and the Lab’s jump up in encounter difficulty, these first zones of Act 2 and 3 serve as a tough test of which cats in your party have real longevity and which are holding you back.

In the Desert, your weakest cats are likely to keep getting downed without easy ways to recover—and by the end of the area, you may want to cut one or more loose to avoid their stat penalties holding you back.

The Lab is a little more direct, with encounters that can instantly injure or kill cats, or leave them with debilitating diseases—and boss fights that severely punish parties that don’t have the kind of DPS they’ll need to thrive in the rest of Act 3.

It’s a clever bit of design, and it’s great to see developers taking more nuanced inspiration from tabletop RPGs than simply adapting the games they played in the 90s. In some ways Mewgenics feels like the mangy little brother to Baldur’s Gate 3, with its own embrace of very D&D-inspired player freedom and expression—albeit in very different ways.

If you’re curious to find out more about Dungeon Crawl Classics and funnels, I recommend checking out the adventure Sailors on the Starless Sea—a wonderfully psychedelic and hilariously horrible dungeon that pits hapless villagers against an incursion of pure chaos. And you know what? It technically even has mutant cats in it…