‘Stray’ Review: A Purr-fect Kitty Adventure
A cyberpunk-themed experience told from the third-person perspective of a tiny orange-colored sewer cat, Stray is a dystopian adventure video game purr-fect for any feline fanatics or for anyone curious about what it would be like to turn their daily vitamin B-12 tablet into a Princess Leia-themed hover-drone.
Created by BlueTwelve Studios and Published by Annapurna Interactive, this paw-sitively excellent experience scratches a behind-the-ear creative itch regarding what it would be like to make a videogame about stray cats. The answer is equal parts achievements in storytelling, ingenuitive gameplay, and bizarrely accurate kitty-simulator. This fur-midable property has already done the im-paw-sible by overtaking God of War as the highest-rated Steam game in 2022.
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Gameplay
Featuring plenty of puzzle-solving mechanics, agile platforming, and a harrowing tail about survival, Stray is a look at a traditional science fiction dystopian city all through the eyes of a cool orange tabby indifferent to what happened to the human overlords that preceded them. I aptly named mine Dick Garfield (after Boy Wonder detective Dick Grayson and lasagna-loving Garfield the Cat).
This unique point of view told from the small-scale perspective of a kitty cat makes it so that the audience is almost always delightfully distracted. As Stray has a very cerebral mystery regarding the world around it that we, as Dick Garfield the cat (at least in my playthrough), get to be slightly withdrawn from. He is a cat strung away in the distractive ball of yarn that is kitty-living. With numerous robot fetch quests and the finding of old memories regarding the robot compatriot B-12, Stray combines this weird mix of a simple cat-out-of-water adventure story with cyberpunk authoritarian dystopian themes.
Graphics
Visually, the game is colorfully vibrant, though it lacks a lot of the more layered elements of ray tracing. There are also the occasional bugs though surprisingly very few for a newly released game. A lot of the science fiction is chewed-upon by the robots' mechanics in how they move and what their behaviors are like, whether they be meditative robots or drunk in a bar due to, what I’m assuming, is faulty and confusing programming.
Story
Stray is set in the distant future after humanity was been wiped by some grand scale cat-astrophe. Told from the purr-spective of a stray cat who stumbles upon the inner workings of an abandoned city sheltering humanoid TV-headed robots, the game focuses on the adventure of the radi-claw kitty into the hiss-tory of this world, and how to find its way home
While it is fun seeing mechanoids that feel, for lack of a better term, slightly human, it is also in these focal moments of mechanized recreations of human indulgence that the audience feels grounded. The robots' computer screen emojis tell us more that there was a tremendous amount of heart in these machines. Dick Garfield is involved in their struggles only because he can maneuver about the world in ways other robots cannot… he is a cat, after all.
Atop of all this, there are some seriously dark and grim moments in Stray. Whether it be survival moments fleeing against the all-consuming Zurks (basically blobby egg hatching mouse-zombies) or sneaking around the evil drone patrolling sentinels, there’s a lot to bounce off of and more than enough conflict to justify this 3-8 hour playing time (depending on if you’re an achievement hunter like I am).
Pros And Cons
Surprisingly most of the most enjoyable gameplay elements lie in living out a cat-like fantasy in a video game. This includes meowing, pawing, scratching up furniture, and knocking over every item in the way quite litter-ally.
What’s a-meow-sing is this mastery of cat-hleticism in the controlled mechanics, much of which is used in the puzzle-solving and sneaky elements so critical in the gameplay. However, the inability to change the game’s difficulty may be a slight hinder to some. While the buttons are purr-ty basic and lack any sort of haptic design from the PS5, Stray does take into account every movement of a cat’s anatomy from every stretch, leap, or sneaky run across the terrain.
Stray is chock-full of feline-good moments about cuddles and catnaps to go along with the game’s incredible soundtrack composed by Yann van der Cruyssen. Adorable tunes that contrast the darkly neon-noir mystery about why so many robots are dying and just why can’t anyone leave…?.
Verdict
Ultimately, this is really a game about cats playing with robots at the end of the world, a premise as equally ridiculous as it is sentimentally sweet. A game that is well worth the experience, Stray is the kind of game you play to de-stress in a way only cats can. A noteworthy indie achievement whose short playthrough is a totally original and fun experience. A must-own if you like cats.
Stray is available for $30 on the PS5, PS4, and PC. For those with PS Plus Extra and Premium subscriptions, the game comes free right MEOW as part of that membership.
Rating: 9/10
Developed by: BlueTwelve; Published: AnnaPurna Interactive; Players: 1; Released: July 19th, 2022; ESRB: E for Animated Blood and Fantasy Violence; MSRP: 29.99
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