The most surprising thing about Mewgenics is its amazing soundtrack—and after 115 hours, I’m still discovering new songs

As I noted in our review, Mewgenics has a very particular tone—and frankly, it doesn’t always hit. There are moments where its early 2000s internet culture sense of humour can feel immature, crass, and out of step with modern gaming.

But I think what makes it ultimately win me over more than it turns me off is its incredible commitment to the silliness. There’s no self-consciousness to Mewgenics, no sense that the creators were ever worried how it would come across. It knows its tone and it goes all-in on it, no matter how ridiculous the outcome.

Nothing exemplifies that more than the music, composed by long-time Edmund McMillen collaborators Ridiculon.

In each section during a run, there’s a new looping instrumental track. They’re fun, and they set the mood of an area well—from the spooky double-bass and piano of the Graveyard to the tense spaghetti western-inspired sound of the Desert.

But then you hit a boss fight, and the full song with lyrics kicks in. Suddenly the music is front-and-centre, like the enemy you’re facing down is getting its own broadway number while it kicks your ass. The drama is amped up, the encounter feels unique, and my god, the songs are so catchy.

With very little dialogue during runs, it’s the music that tells the story, selling you on the strange world of Mewgenics.

We get the cats’ grubby perspective on life in Chumbucket Kitty (“Where’s that smell coming from? So stinkily disgusting, so delightfully dead / A decomposing rodent somewhere near the baby’s bed”) and Eatin’ Rats (“All of my nights I’m chasing rats / All of my days, I’m taking naps / And in my dreams, I’m the king of cats”).

In Crystalline Dreams, the giant spider at the end of the Caves sings a genuinely unsettling description of exactly what she’s going to do to you (“Silky threads feel like a snuggle / But getting loose is a struggle”). Your fight against a mutant witch coven in the molten core of the earth is accompanied by Down with the Devil, a scratchy lament from some lost soul about toiling away in Hell (“How long, will it be eternity? / Shovelling crap while my boss looks over me?”) and the freaks down there with him (“That guy next to me looks weird / He’s got a tail where his leg should be / The Devil only knows how he pees”).

They’re funny, unbelievably catchy (I’ve had “Where’s that smell coming from?” stuck in my head for weeks), and really effortlessly capture a huge range of different styles. It’s silly stuff, but produced with the right level of seriousness, selling the grand joke of Mewgenics with a straight face.

Cat’s entertainment

What impressed me most, though, is that it just keeps going and going and going. Mewgenics is a really big game, and as it goes, it escalates wildly. You start out simply scrapping in alleyways, by about 50 hours in you’re literally going to the Moon, and things get exponentially weirder beyond that. No matter where you go, no matter how surreal the location, there’s always yet more music perfectly crafted for the current moment. Even now, over 115 hours in, I’m still discovering new tracks I’ve never heard before to accompany wild new moments in my journey.

It’s an incredible accomplishment that adds yet another layer of discovery to a game already overflowing with them. Each new song you hear is like its own reward for getting so far, and there always seems to be another one to reach.

Meanwhile, Mewgenics keeps sending you back to old areas too, where the songs start to feel like old friends, their lyrics permanently etched into your brain. Along with the various other unlocks these excursions can earn, beating the same boss enough times adds their song to the radio playlist back at your house, allowing it to start up randomly while you’re managing your horrible little house of cats.

I find myself becoming weirdly nostalgic for old runs whenever one of these tracks comes on—and the extra commentary on them from the DJ gives them a whole new dimension. I’m a particularly big fan of him dissecting the definition of why exactly a cat would be a “chumbucket kitty” when chum is only used at sea.

In the end, the songs that started as surprising discoveries along your journey come home with you to become permanent marks of your achievements, like an auditory trophy case. Yes, a song about putting rats between two slices of bread is very silly, but I worked hard to earn it—and you can certainly tell that Ridiculon spared no effort to make it.