Stray Review
A sci/fi cat simulator
What do you think about when you hear “video game”? What kind of gameplay immediately comes to mind?
Video games, as a medium, for me, conjure images of adventure, exploration, fighting enemies, conquering worlds, and even building a criminal empire. Typically, when I think about video games, I’m controlling some kind of humanoid character, be it an incarnation of me as a human, a Khajiit (an anthropomorphic cat from Elsweyr in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim), a pirate, Batman, or a wheel of cheese hungry for pellets (and sometimes ghosts.)
Not once when you think about video games does controlling a cat come up, and that’s the novelty surrounding the recently released Stray.
Stray, developed by BlueTwelve Studio and published by Annapurna Interactive, was released roughly two weeks ago for the PlayStation 4 and 5 systems and Microsoft Windows. I had the chance to play it on my brother’s PlayStation 5 because he had the upgraded PlayStation Plus subscription, whereas I only had the Essential tier.
Gameplay
As you’ve likely gathered, you play as an unnamed orange cat exploring a post-apocalyptic future world. You wake up with three other cats in the remnants of some industrial facility overtaken by plants. As the game guides you forward with the “jump here” indicator, your cat unexpectedly falls into a deep hole in a sewer system.
From there, you’re tasked with navigating an underground, walled-off world occupied by humanoid robots and have a single goal in mind: get back to the outside world. You go about your business doing cat things: jumping on furniture, sleeping, meowing with a dedicated “meow” button, pushing over items from shelves.
Ultimately, the story is told through text box interactions you have with robots in the city. The noises they make when they speak to you are somewhat reminiscent of the gibberish spoken by Sims (the people) in the Sims games.
Final thoughts
Stray is an interesting concept, for sure. The cat moves precisely like you’d expect it to, easily and fluidly going underneath furniture, crawling through tight spaces, and jumping back when it gets startled.
I loved the visuals in this game. The dank underground city, neon lights, the way the robots mimicked human behaviors, the reflections in the windows, screens, and water, the plants, and even the graffiti on the walls made me want to stop and examine it that much more closely.
But the “playing as a cat” gimmick isn’t enough to make me want to play the game a second time (outside of Skyrim, where playing as a humanoid cat enables me to delve into dungeons, become a master assassin, and kill dragons.)
The best way I can describe this game to someone who’s never heard of it is “atmospheric.” It’s worth checking out for the visuals and gameplay mechanic of being a cat alone, but I could never justify paying the asking price of $30 for a game that can be completed in under two hours (and there’s an achievement for doing so.)
