A new Mewgenics update solves one of my biggest frustrations

A new Mewgenics update has arrived, and I'm breathing a sigh of relief. One of the first bosses I ever encountered in Edmund McMillen and Tyler Glaiel's million-selling roguelike was Fenrir, an evasive cat with a penchant for bear traps. He's not a hard fight, but he is an annoying one because of the need to keep all of his hidden threats in mind. Thankfully, the latest set of Mewgenics patch notes will make this a much more bearable task, and also include some more welcome quality-of-life upgrades.

Mewgenics doesn't give you complete control over how your cats move, only the tile you'd like them to end up at. Combine this with Fenrir's ability to slap invisible bear traps all over the map, and you run into some frustrations fast. You can briefly see where he's placing them, but then they vanish from sight, forcing you to keep a mental (or physical) note or where they all are. If one of your characters is intent on pathing over one, there's been no easy answer other than taking the hit - until now.

"Traps can now be triggered with physical attacks and abilities." That's all I needed to hear, and something I kept trying to do even when I knew it wouldn't work. Now you're able to manually spring any hidden surprises without having to step onto them. It's a change that gives you an answer without simply handing you full square-by-square control of movement and eliminating that element of the strategy entirely.

Alongside this, flying characters have been given an upgrade. A visual effect and altered walk cycle will make it easier to keep track of which members of your team (and the enemy roster) can fly over other units and objects. They'll also correctly view fire tiles (which can still hurt them) as a hazard. More generally, squares that take you in range of ambushing threats such as the Rattlesnek are now weighted appropriately when any cat calculates their path.

An overhaul to how cats are grouped when you browse through them in your house is also a welcome one. When in the default view, they'll be sorted by age only (with no consideration for the room they're in), with any dead souls listed at the end. Zooming in on a specific room will restrict the selection list to exclusively that population. The developers add that "list location memory should be a little bit better when moving cats to pipe/box and then continuing with arrows."

There are a few other nice additions to pick out in the remaining patch notes. Loot that drops from the final boss of each act is now "explicitly a luck roll." The team explains, "luck affected this a little before, now it should affect it more, making it easier to judge risk here." Freeze should now protect corpses from damage, a handful of incorrect tooltips (such as 'Pins and Needles' and 'Old Hose') have been fixed, and captured familiars will spawn after everything else is placed on the map. That means you can no longer insta-cheese encounters by flooding them with hundreds of charmed flies.

Mewgenics update 1.0.20763 is live now on Steam. With a 'full completion' time estimated in the 300+ hour mark, I expect I'll be playing this one for most of the rest of the year, so I'm glad to see these key issues being ironed out sooner rather than later.