If you’re playing a roguelike, dying repeatedly and learning from your mistakes is the entire point. Failure in tactical RPG Mewgenics, however, can be hard to swallow: Who wants to see their cute cat die savagely? The good news is that you don’t have to accept Mewgenics‘ death sentence. The real question is whether you should.
As designed, Mewgenics prevents fans from “save scumming,” that is, restarting your game to undo a bad outcome. The game recognizes when you leave in the middle of battle, and will issue a Resseti-style warning to discourage you from doing it again. The second time you restart, the game will inflict one of your cats with a debuff that gives it 10% chance of disobeying your orders. If you tempt fate a third time, Steven, the entity who gives you a hard time, will take over your game entirely. From there, you’ll be able to pick the trajectory of your course and equip cats as you see fit, but Mewgenics‘ battles will be controlled by AI.
It’s a clever mechanic built around grace, as the first infraction is not immediately punished. And while some people hate not being allowed to win every battle, life happens. Mewgenics battles tend to be short, but you might not be able to finish an encounter all the way through for whatever reason. There’s no way to save and quit once you’re in a battle. I know some players have had their games crash, or made the mistake of clicking on the wrong thing.
Whatever your motivation, there are a few ways around Mewgenics‘ save scumming feature. The easiest one I’ve found on Windows is to press Control + Alt + Del, go to the Task Manager, and then click on Details. From there, find Mewgenics.exe and right click on it. You want to select ‘End Process Tree.’ You’ll want to do this before the game loads into a different state — for example, if your team wipes, you need to perform this action before you return home. There are also limits to how far back this will set you. In the middle of a normal battle, reloading the game will plop you on the map, where you can reconfigure your cat’s load out. If you do it during the roaming boss battles, reloading will place you at the start of the actual encounter — you won’t be able to choose different cats or items.
I know it might be tempting to undo anything that sucks, but you can only push your luck so far. The game will go out of its way to present obstacles in the form of events or boss battles. Once, in a single world, one of my cats randomly caught fire, another one contracted Ebola, and a different one disappeared altogether. You can reduce some of these events, but some are built around your stats — so there’s no way to prevent the outcome. Hell, a few times I passed the skill check or tried walking away just for the game to redo the event and force me to fail. Another time, the boss attacking my cat sanctuary was so powerful that it didn’t matter how many times I retried it. I had to accept the wipe and move on. At least some quests are built around you having to sacrifice your cats. Cats can also randomly die at home due to old age or from a fight with their siblings.
I’d argue that death and bad luck push you to play in novel ways. Having actual consequences also makes surviving a run all the more meaningful. And hey, losing can be memorable too. Plus, Mewgenics never lets you fail too hard. Daily strays ensure that you have a steady stock of characters to adventure and breed. Any time I’ve lost a cat midway through a run, the game eventually gave me an event where a buddy joins my team. Steven’s takeover is worth experiencing at least once as well. The AI can be shockingly smart and can teach you new strategies for your next playthrough.
So, yes, you can turn off the save scum prevention. Use this knowledge wisely.
