Mewgenics was never on my radar. I didn’t follow Edmund McMillen’s past work, and I haven’t gotten into The Binding of Isaac. But, if you show me something that:

1. Has tiles
2. Is a roguelike

I’m probably going to like it! So, after hearing it was a “tactical RPG roguelike,” I was paying attention.

After playing it for 58 hours, Mewgenics frustrated me a ton. Mistakes are heavily punished, and carry heavy consequences. And with over 200 hours of main campaign content, it will be a while before I see the end. Yet, it’s a wholly unique experience, and as I write I want nothing more than to jump back in and play it right now.

Tactical Tiles

The moment-to-moment gameplay of Mewgenics is a tactical RPG. The battlefields themselves are quite small-scale, but the damage numbers and scaling feel at home with a proper tactics RPG. Think the arena of Into the Breach with the damage numbers and class system of Fire Emblem.

Speaking of which, the mixing and matching of classes is one of the most fun parts of the gameplay. Every class has a different style of basic attack, and a different pool of abilities to pull from. You start with the basic attack, one active ability, and one passive ability, and draft the rest of the abilities as your cats level up.

The name of the game here is combos. There are no end-all be-all abilities that will make everything easy, or that you’ll want to take 100% of the time. In every great roguelike, the answer to every question is “it depends.” I’m happy to report Mewgenics follows in the footsteps of those greats.

As you navigate a run, you’ll go to different combat arenas, shops, and events. These events often come with choices: do you sacrifice half your HP for an unknown benefit? Do you try to pass this skill check, despite there being literal stink lines coming off your cat’s stats? It’s tough to know, and the wrong choice can doom your whole run, or worse.

Roguelike… Roguelite… Rogue-ish?

The progression of Mewgenics is hard to describe. Send cats on tactical adventures that almost always yield some forward momentum. Unlock new locations, classes, and items. This is happening constantly. But, you will undoubtedly return to the same locations across multiple runs, using those new classes and items to complete quests and learn new things.

After those runs, though, Mewgenics’s hook really begins. Not only can you keep items in storage, but your cats will breed to help create your next run’s chosen ones. You’ll also need to find food and money along the way to help keep the next generation full and focused.

I was never much of a Chao Garden guy, so it surprised me how invested I was in the breeding aspects. It was fun to see what little monsters my kitty crew would create — and what random names they would get.¹ It was a little awkward playing on the Steam Deck and knowing the guy next to me on the plane was watching these cats get it on, but I’m sure he would’ve understood if I told him “it was for stats.”²

Something that struck me most about this strange hybrid structure was the way it makes each run feel so consequential. When I’m playing Slay the Spire, for instance, I live my life a quarter mile at a time, almost always choosing the riskier, higher-payoff option. I either win this run or I start over, so who cares?

In Mewgenics, I was a lot more calculated. I need to get these guys home safe, because I need them to defend the house. I want them to pass on a strong ability, stat, or mutation. This cat is named “Little Man,” and that’s fucking awesome. If something were to happen to him, I’d end it all. Whatever the reason, I almost always felt a strong attachment to my cat squadron, and felt like I was calculating risk in a much different way than other roguelites.

Eternal Life

Above, you’ll see my save file. You’ll notice that aforementioned 58 hours, along with a number that may terrify you: 38% complete. I cannot believe those numbers are staring at me right now. If you are like me³, that combination of numbers might terrify you, too. But Mewgenics makes the most of every hour.

Sure, there’s a ton to see. But even without unlocking everything, there’s plenty of times you could call it quits. There’s no rush to get to the end. There’s no cutscenes with key exposition you forget if you set it down for a few months. Take your time! Hop in for a run or two every week! Maybe spend a couple hours at a time managing your cats in the house to breed your perfect soldiers with dragon wings and ADHD!

As with any roguelike, there’s bound to be plenty of repetition during this long runtime. Luckily, it’s got an incredible soundtrack to keep you humming along to. Seriously, these songs are catchy. In a genre where I usually put in earbuds with a podcast, I was turning up the volume on the Steam Deck and humming along.

Mewgenics is abrasive. There’s a ton of mechanics and combinations for both the players and enemies, losing always has permanent consequences, and it feels like the mountaintop is still so far, despite the time I’ve put in. There will be some people who just don’t click with this game.

Luckily, I’m not “some people,” and I think it’s fantastic. Let’s go 150 more hours till that file says 100%, baby.

The post Mewgenics is Unforgiving, Unrelenting, and Never-Ending. I Love It. appeared first on Palette Swap.

SAN MATEO, Calif. — After hearing that Nintendo Switch lifetime sales figures had finally breached 155 million units, executives at Sony were anxiously trying to decide whether or not to hit the big red button that unveils a bunch of previously unreported PlayStation 2 sales again.

“Anytime the competition gets close, I press this button, and somehow a janitor finds a bunch of old receipts in our warehouse,” explained Hideaki Nishino, CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment. “Suddenly, it looks like we might have sold another five million PS2s and just not said anything to anyone. But it could always be more, depending. I would still like to congratulate the Nintendo Switch on being the best selling Nintendo console of all time, and let’s leave it at that, shall we?”

Many gamers were bewildered by the new developments.

“Are people just buying PS2s instead of PS5s or something?” read a response on Bluesky. “You have to wonder where this is all coming from. I mean, nobody could have predicted this. The GameCube lost in sales to the PS2 big time, but like, that’s over and done with. Why are they still trying to compete? The console wars are over, man.”

Nintendo responded in kind with additional information.

“Well, well, well, would you look at that,” said Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa. “I think we forgot to carry the one here, and… yeah, my math was totally off. We actually sold, like, ten million more units than I thought. My B. So yeah, make sure you write that down. 165 million units. Way more than the PlayStation 2. And if I hear anything otherwise I may have to check my math again.”

At press time, Sony unveiled plans to just release the PlayStation 2 again in lieu of new hardware.

The post Sony Exec Nervously Hovering Finger Over Additional PS2 Sales Button appeared first on Palette Swap.

LOS ANGELES — Fresh off of breakout appearances in hit games Dead by Daylight, and Fortnite, Ghostface has landed a role in the upcoming Scream 7, sources confirmed. 

“Good for him branching out into other media,” said horror fan Shawn Greene. “I always wanted to know more about him after he showed up in a few of my favorite games. I wonder if he will be playing a good guy or a bad guy? Maybe he’s the new lead, since they fired Melissa Barrera for vocally opposing the genocide in Gaza. Ghostface better not use that silly voice of his to speak up for Palestinians. They’ll can his ass.” 

Many fans of Ghostface’s various video game appearances were skeptical that he had the acting chops to transition to film. 

“Crossing over into movies isn’t for everybody,” said skeptical gamer Lizzy Ward. “Mario and Sonic did okay, but those were animated films where they were merely voicing characters. Ghostface is going to have to actually act. I’m surprised they didn’t want to cast a more well established presence, but oh well. Oh, and I think Lara Croft is going to be great as Gail Weathers’ newest on-air competitor. Or was that a Fortnite thing I read about?”

Regardless of some fans’ skepticism, the film’s director assured fans that the franchise was in good hands. 

“People have been saying this movie is doomed, and I can’t wait to prove them wrong,” said director Kevin Williamson. “Sure, the lead from our last installment got fired because of her support of Palestine way back in 2023. Sure, no horror franchise has ever stayed good for seven movies. And sure, the casting of Ghostface is a little stunt-y. But uh, you know. Just please go see it. We gotta pay for this damn Skeet Ulrich hologram that cost more than Skeet Ulrich would have.”

As of press time, when asked for a comment about the role in Scream 7, Ghostface just kept asking us about our favorite horror films. 

The post Video Game Superstar Ghostface Lands Role in Upcoming Scream VII appeared first on Palette Swap.

Designing a hero in a game is a complex art task. Not only do you have to properly conceptualize the character, but also that character’s role in the game, how it matches the tone of the narrative, and how their design interacts mechanically with other characters. If you would like a masterclass in how to do this, simply look at Rem, the newest character in Deadlock, who is a sweepy widdle buddy who takes naps. 

While Deadlock is technically still in early access, it has been humbly updating since Valve had to acknowledge its existence. It is no longer the ugly duckling that is a bit difficult to place in the canon of Valve’s releases, but a gorgeously designed and fully realized Valve game whose influences from DOTA 2 to TF2 could not be more apparent. Last Thursday, Valve introduced the Old Gods, New Blood update. It is one of the biggest updates to the game yet, one with huge quality of life and lore additions including a much less demanding 4v4 Street Brawl mode that is quick and great at easing new players into the game. 

As with some previous updates, Valve is introducing several new heroes on a rolling schedule, and players can vote on which one is next. One of those characters stood out and, to nobody’s surprise, was the first to be rolled out. That character is Rem, a little owl/bat/fuzzy looking buddy who wears pajamas and a nightcap and holds a little candle out. His power is that he takes naps and throws his pillow. 

“An accidental stowaway from the world of dreams, Rem has found himself stranded in the city that never sleeps,” the update reads. “Pillow fights are Rem's preferred form of conflict, tossing his favorite pillow at enemies to knock them back when they're getting too close. His friends, however, he likes to keep nearby - leaping to their aid when things get dicey and taking a quick nap on their shoulder. His Lil Helpers are curious creatures, taking interest in everything the streets of New York have to offer, and cheering on his allies as they go. Ultimately when Naptime hits, no one will be able to keep their eyes open. - The best part of being asleep, is being asleep.”

Valve absolutely killed it with this guy. Something that many games get wrong, from the last two Final Fantasy games to the recent release Highguard, is that you almost always need a playable character who is a weird little guy or a robot or something. Deadlock has several of these, including a reanimated Latina gargoyle named Ivy who wants to protect Spanish Harlem, but Rem really takes the cake conceptually and in execution. His combat barks are mainly nap-based, like a six-year-old who had played too much and tuckered himself out. 

Rem’s primary weapon in combat is the little candle he holds, which zaps with a fairly decent range. Rem is one of a few characters small enough to fit into various crawl spaces in the map, allowing him to snag goodies in the tunnels. In combat, he serves a support role, with his pillow skill providing regular area damage that helps wipe out troopers in the lane. Rem’s ability Tag Along warps him to a nearby friendly character, healing both himself and the character he’s attached to while he takes a little nap. This serves as both healing and a movement ability, allowing Rem to escape or close distance to an ongoing fight. Rem can also use Tag Along to warp between characters, which refreshes the duration of the skill once per hero. His Lil Helpers, which look and act like the Susuwatari from Spirited Away, can be sent out to do chores like collect boxes and do Sinner’s Sacrifices, or to provide buffs to friendly units. Lastly, his Naptime ability puts enemies in an entire area to sleep, which is exceedingly powerful when a group of enemies are clustered together.

I cannot stress how fun Rem is to play and build around. In the few rounds I have played with him, I’ve used builds that emphasize his pillow, making it hit like you have a brick in there. Later items like Mystic Reverb or Surge of Power can be used to power Rem's pillow up, providing a slowdown effect or a buff respectively every time he hits something with it. I’m sure that players will immediately find new and busted ways to break him.

But the bigger lesson, particularly in light of Highguard’s launch, might be on how to correctly cultivate a game. Deadlock is in a good and stable place now because it slowly gestated and iterated over years, listening to the needs of its community. This is a luxury of time and budget that many games simply don’t have. That difficult, conversational work is a key component to figuring out exactly what people want, it is not something you can always assume. And one thing that people clearly want is a sleepy little furry guy in his jammies who simply wants to go night night to dreamtime.

Closed captioning has been around since the 70s with the express purpose of creating subtitles as a “transcription or translation of the dialogue when sound is available but not understood” by the viewer, whether sound is muted, drowned out by ambient noise, or the user is deaf or hard of hearing. Closed captions by and large are all but essential in today’s media landscape, either because actors whisper or a show’s dynamic range is screwy. A lot of people watch TV with subtitles these days, including English-speaking anime fans. Unfortunately for those anime fans, the closed captioning for Crunchyroll shows over the past couple of years has severely declined in quality, and it looks like it's going to become an even bigger problem for how we watch anime industry-wide. 

Crunchyroll fails to meet industry standards for Closed Captioning - Anime Feminist

Despite having a near-complete monopoly on the anime streaming industry in 2024, Crunchyroll does not offer closed captioning for the majority of its English dubs.

Anime FeministVrai Kaiser

These issues were first brought to light by Anime Feminist back in 2024, where writer Vrai Kaiser wrote that in the wake of Crunchyroll’s huge merger with Funimation for $143 million, the anime streamer didn’t meet the industry standard for closed captioning with its English-dubbed shows. In the piece, Kaiser noted that outside of a few Toonami shows like Attack on Titan and My Hero Academia, most shows don’t have closed captioning. It was an issue Funimation remedied back in the day to ensure all of its English-dubbed shows had closed captioning options in accordance with the Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act (CCVAA), but that change didn’t carry over when Crunchyroll merged Funimation’s library into its own in 2022—a merger that led to fan outrage over losing digital anime content they once owned on Funimation. 

Since then, Kaiser reported that as of February 2024, a Crunchyroll spokesperson said it was still working to add more closed captions to its catalog. 

At worst, Crunchyroll’s subtitling creates the annoying scenario where you’re given two options: English and English CC. The first option translates Japanese text written within the show, where things like text messages, signage, and the like are translated in concert with dialogue—something that’s especially helpful for readers who are either curious or need to know all the fucking rules in Jujutsu Kaisen Culling Game Part 1. 

The latter, in theory, provides viewers who are deaf or hard of hearing with captions that convey information about background noise and speaker changes within a show. But more often than not, Crunchyroll’s closed captioning, alongside its subtitling as of late, has become a far cry from what the company used to offer. This is a result of the popularity of anime rising exponentially. Crunchyroll as a company has an insatiable need to beef up the quantity of its shows in its streaming catalogue without giving a damn about the quality of its localizations. While Crunchyroll has claimed it doesn’t use AI for its subtitles or closed captions, the kinds of errors being made in these captions have made viewers suspicious. Especially, because, well, they have been caught red handed before.

Crunchyroll’s first AI incident saw users catch the German subtitles for the show Necronomico and the Cosmic Horror Show with the words ChatGPT explicitly written in its subtitling. Speaking with Aftermath, a spokesperson provided a statement saying the “AI-generated subtitles were employed by a third-party vendor, which is in violation of our agreement.” After that, the show’s German subtitles no longer include the ChatGPT prefix, according to Anime News Network. However, that hasn’t stopped the anime from having a bit of a tarnished reputation as the “AI” show online in the wake of its subtitling incident. 

The second time was last November, in a report from Anime Corner, where former Fakku developer Daiz posted on Twitter that Crunchyroll appeared to have used AI in the closed captioning for the sixth episode of the show, The Banished Court Magician Aims to Become the Strongest. Upon further digging from Daiz, they discovered that the episode’s screwy closed captions were because Crunchyroll was working with Ollang, a San Francisco-based company that, you guessed it, touts its usage of AI to get the job done using buzzy corpo speak like “optional human-in-the-loop” and “localization, reimagined for the modern enterprise.” 

Mind you, Crunchyroll president Rahul Purini told Forbes last April, “We are not considering AI in the creative process, including our voice actors. We consider them to be creators because they are contributing to the story and plot with their voice.” 

Forbes also noted that Purini added that they are, however, looking at AI to improve back-end systems and enhance the customer experience through features such as discoverability, recommendations, and personalization, rather than touching the shows themselves.

The most recent example came from the folks in the Highlight Reel Discord (Correction, 1/27/26, 3:47pm--This story initially misstated which Discord the example was from). In the third episode of No Gun No Life, an anime about a detective with a gun for a head, eagle-eyed viewers pointed out some really weird closed captions. In this scene, two characters approach the gun-headed detective, with one of them saying, “So you’re Juzo, the Resolver?” However, with the English closed captioning on for the show, the pair instead approach him saying, “So your Jews are resolver?” A slip-up, sure. But given that Crunchyroll has been caught using AI for its captions before, it has set a precedent for fans to believe any mistranslation in their closed captioning must be due to AI. Aftermath reached out to Crunchyroll for comment about its closed captioning and whether AI is involved in the process.

There have been instances where bullying has convinced companies like Amazon to reverse its AI initiatives, such as abysmal AI dubbing. But companies tend to follow the leader, and one of Crunchyroll’s major competitors in the anime market, Netflix, has had no qualms about publicly stating that they will use AI in subtitles.

Highguard, the PvP “raid shooter” with phantom horses from former Titanfall devs, is out today. The road to this point has been long and winding, albeit only in terms of how it’s felt to traverse: Revealed as The Game Awards’ “one more thing” final trailer in December, Highguard proceeded to disappear into a month-long cloud of speculation and derision. 

What was this generic-looking multiplayer game that dared to occupy a slot reserved, in viewers’ minds, for Half-Life 3 or Elder Scrolls VI? Details were scant bordering on nonexistent. Ragebaiters and clip farmers on X and YouTube feasted. Highguard, the narrative went, had doomed itself to being the next Concord. As of today, we finally have an answer to the question of how Highguard actually plays – decently enough, apparently – as well as a greater understanding of how we ended up here in the first place. It didn’t have to be this way! But it also sort of did.

Speaking with Kotaku, Wildlight Entertainment co-founder Chad Grenier explained that the plan since “day one” had been to shadow drop the fantastical FPS, as it had worked out well for his previous project, Apex Legends. But then Geoff Keighley, an old friend, stepped in.

“We’ve known Geoff for a long time, and he said, ‘let me do something,’ that’s maybe a little risky in hindsight – but different, [to] take a free to play PvP Raid Shooter and do something with it,” Grenier said. “So we rushed a trailer together. I wish the reception had been better, but in hindsight we made a trailer to entertain really quickly, and didn’t show the gameplay loop, and what’s different and unique.”

Releasing your first game as an independent – although clearly well-funded – studio, who’d turn down that kind of free marketing? Especially when your game is cannon-balling into a crowded genre rife with high-profile failures? In a previous era, it would have been a no-brainer, a gift horse you wouldn’t even think about looking in the mouth. But a confluence of modern and age-old factors quickly turned the tide against Highguard.

Much of the ensuing ugliness stemmed from the fact that Wildlight went radio silent following the initial Game Awards reveal. Those who expected a more traditional marketing campaign – a drip feed of character and map reveals, or even just a more elaborate trailer – got nothing, so they used their imaginations to fill in the blanks. In response, Wildlight decided to maintain course.

“We stayed silent because we knew that the first time, the next time that we say anything to the audience, it better be the game and let the game speak for itself,” Grenier told Kotaku.

Depending on how you measure it, this ended up being a mistake. I totally understand the allure of a splashy, Apex Legends-style shadow drop, but after doubling back and deciding to reveal the game shortly before release, you can’t really have it both ways. Moreover, the internet of now is very different from the internet of 2019. Covid transformed social media into an endless, awful conversation; once you pop, the horrors never stop. Debuting and then disengaging isn’t really an option – at least, not if you want to keep the vultures away. Recent years have only worsened this dynamic, with short-form video content taking over as the predominant mode of expression and giving rise to a generation of caustic clip farmers who yank at the udder of any perceived drama of the week until it’s chafed and bone dry. Then they move onto the next thing and deploy the same playbook again. 

Highguard got hit even harder than it otherwise might’ve due to the fact that, at least in games, December constitutes the dead of winter, and there wasn’t really a “next thing” for cynical, opportunistic content creators to monkey-bar over to. So one video became two, and then three, and four, and so on. With each passing week, continued silence from Wildlight functioned as additional evidence that something was amiss. The Highguard mystery, unfortunately, lent itself perfectly to sloptubers’ regular stream-of-videos approach. 

And then there was the Concord of it all. While comparisons were clumsy at best – Highguard does not have major publisher backing, for one – the facts of a situation do not matter in the modern social media landscape. Feelings dictate people’s response, and they are easily and algorithmically manipulated. The rough outline of a situation similar to Concord’s was there, and that’s all content creators needed to whip portions of the internet into a frenzy: The Game Awards, in this case, functioned like Sony, an institution propping up a safe-looking hero shooter no one asked for. 

Rage at the industry, misdirected or not, did the rest. Certainly, there is warranted fatigue around live service games emerging from the triple-A (or in Wildlight’s case, triple-A-adjacent) sector. Big, more traditional video game companies want a ladle full of the perpetual stew Fortnite, League of Legends, and a small handful of others have transformed into an infinite food supply, and in pursuit of that, they’ve misused and abused once great studios and released a series of duds like the aforementioned Concord – by no means a terrible game, but something so aggressively Fine that it failed to really grab anyone. 

But right-wing sloptubers have repeatedly harnessed this energy to feed their endless culture wars, claiming that diversity is the reason these games fail. More than that, they want them to fail; they approach the prospect with a sort of knives-out glee. All of it fits their narrative that even with hundreds of thousands or millions of followers, they are the brave little guy(s) speaking truth to power amid an industry of shill-happy journalists and agenda-pushing developers. Within this framework, there is room to advance conspiracies, to present the industry as a series of shadowy cabals working against The Common Gamer (rather than a series of out-in-the-open cabals working against everyone except themselves). Again, Highguard’s prolonged period of silence – after a push from Geoff Keighley, gaming’s self-appointed kingmaker – provided a perfect seed bed for those kinds of tall tales to take hold. 

Facing down a truly nightmarish minefield, it’s hard to fault Highguard’s developers for opting to disengage from all the engagement bait. Arguably, there was no correct way to play this. Turn down an opportunity to get millions of eyes on your game during the biggest event of the year? No shot. Spin up a whole marketing campaign when your trailer was already a last-second effort? Basically impossible. Play whack-a-mole with conspiratorial nonsense ginned up by the usual sloptuber suspects? Would’ve almost certainly been used as additional fuel for the fire. Maybe a little good faith communication directly from the developers would’ve helped put faces to names and engender trust, but there’s no way to know – and the risk was obviously very high.

Regardless, Highguard now finds itself positioned awkwardly at the starting line, albeit well ahead of where many others begin. On one hand, you can’t deny that all of this free publicity bolstered the game’s player count, with its launch day numbers peaking at nearly 100,000 concurrents (and hundreds of thousands more watching on Twitch and YouTube). That is… uncommon, for an indie shooter, to say the least. On the other, public sentiment is not great. Technical issues and performance problems are being received even worse than they otherwise would be, and every design decision has been met with intense doom-and-gloom scrutiny – despite the fact that this is day one of a game meant to have a long tail. The game’s Steam reviews have cratered to “mostly negative.” Geoff is running a weird sort of victory lap, which probably isn’t helping matters.

Lending more credence to my assertion that the internet has decayed past the point of usefulness, meanwhile, is the fact that Guy "DrDisrespect" Beahm – a sad middle-aged man who dresses up like an even sadder middle-aged man and who in 2024 confessed to inappropriate DMs with a minor – lied about attending a Highguard event last week, going so far as to post an image of a fake badge. This led to outrage and controversy, followed by debunkings that, per how these things tend to work, almost certainly didn't spread as far as the initial misinformation.

Where things go next from here is anybody’s guess, but I imagine many will be watching with great interest – and not necessarily for the right reasons.

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Despite all the sights and sounds, one scene defined TwitchCon 2025. During a meet and greet, a man tried to forcibly kiss Emiru, a streamer.

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