Stray - In Review

Very occasionally, there comes an experience that manages to stand out from the rest. A fresh take on a beloved genre, if in this case there’s anything to immediately compare to. The magical thing about games is how they can draw you into wonderful environments that have been lovingly handcrafted to tell a story, or just allow you to wander about and explore. Sometimes, however, they can also help you to transcend even species, allowing you to walk in their shoes and change your perspective. We now come to a personally highly anticipated game of mine; Stray.

My interest stemmed from a GIF I came across on Twitter codenamed ‘HK’, all the way back in 2016. This showed something quite unbelievable to me at the time; some of the most incredible graphics of a cat walking a dark backstreet and climbing pipes, in a cyberpunk dystopia inhabited by a robot or two. Unreal Engine 4 graphics were a new thing to me at the time and I believed initially that it was a movie; the shadows, animation, lighting and reflections all looked realistic. That is until I saw the word ‘game’ inside the tweet. Now it is finally fully-realised and receiving serious acclaim across the board. If I have piqued your curiosity (and hopefully not killed you), it’s now time to delve into an adventure of epic (yet small) proportions.

Peering Out From the Balcony

Our nameless ginger protagonist starts their adventure doing what cats do best: looking outside while in a cat-loaf stance. Unlike many other games it will take a moment for you to adjust to what’s going on, as there is no HUD initially and there are only cats (the expected trope being that these are usually non-player characters). You approach the others and interact, performing cat-like actions like rubbing up against each other and meowing (yes, there is also a separate button for that). It’s hard to emphasise how good the feline animations look here. Let’s just say cat lovers will be left with no other option other than to let out a brief “awwww”. 

With all the pleasantries out of the way, our gang ventures out into the beautifully overgrown concrete landscape, leaping over ledges, pipes and railings. For me this evokes gorgeous post-apocalyptic vibes akin to a game like, say, Enslaved: Odyssey to the West. As our team ventures on, you learn the various types of ledge to look for using the one-button system. Being somewhat a platforming connoisseur myself, I found myself wanting to perform the actions individually from each ledge grab to which direction to point. After some quick-thinking scenarios later on, in hindsight this was probably the best system to maintain the pace of the game. The gang flows from one platform to the next, without a care in the world. Suddenly, our protagonist makes an unfortunate misstep. Desperately trying to cling on to the ledge with their claws, our other felines can only watch as our furry friend gradually loses grip and plunges into the darkness below. The resulting ‘meow’ is both haunting and horrifying, making you feel almost helpless.

Fall From Grace

After crashing down into a garbage dump at the bottom of the darkness, our furry friend gradually wakes up. Now alone, injured and limping (it’ll be okay cat-lovers, it’ll be okay…) our protagonist finds themself inside some kind of concrete sewage structure with metal doors. You see some cute little pinkish creatures rustle out from a garbage bag and scurry through a gap under a metal door. You follow, leading into the darkly lit abandoned environment you’ll be in for a while. Here you fine-tune your ledge-spotting abilities, learning that if you meow the game will help to hint at the next bit. You may notice, once again, how well animated your feline friend is. Every time they line up for a ledge, they are either reaching down to prepare for a downwards jump or winding up to prepare for a leap upwards.

The other aspect you may start to notice is just how much the game plays on your knowledge of how felines move as well as their little habits. No doubt here you may find the urge to perform one of their greatest hits. You may notice some paint cans are a little close to the edge. Wouldn’t it be fun to just…..push it off? So you do just that, nudging them to your heart’s content. Then you notice a glass ceiling that you can’t quite get through to. You know you need to….after all the signs you’ve been following all this time are inside there. Then you notice another paint can that’s precariously balanced just above it. At this point you know what to do; you send this paint can packing and hear the glorious crash of the glass below. A well-executed part of this game is that it encourages you to think like a cat to solve puzzles, or maybe as you’ve seen around the internet, with quite entertaining results.

After a while jumping from ledge to ledge in this beautifully crafted dystopian landscape, you run into those cute little critters from a while back. Then they start staring at you. Then there are a huge number of them staring at you. The vibe changes and you let out a small hiss while backing away. Suddenly, the pace changes and before you know it you are all-out sprinting in an effort to get away from these critters, who have a surprising amount of speed and leaping power to attempt to latch onto you. This frenzied chase lasts a while until you are finally able to make your escape. The audio here really got my heart racing; it never fails to carry tense as well as exploratory moments. 

The Paranoid Slums

After reaching safety (for now) you end up strolling down a dark, peaceful alleyway with doors either side in a downtown neighbourhood. You then come face to face with the locals; robots with quite human behaviours. It appears that they may have become accustomed to running away from small things (the pinkish critters perhaps?), and they don’t hesitate to lock themselves away on your arrival. During your travels, in an abandoned flat, you will have located a small adorable floating drone called B-12. This drone serves as your companion to help communicate between these bi-pedal droids and our furry friend, as well as having their own story arc. Once you have made peace with the locals, you learn more about the mysterious pink critters. It transpires they are a special form of bacteria that went rogue, evolved and developed the ability to even eat through metal itself, known only as the Zurks. You also learn of a particular bi-pedal entity called Momo. We’ll speak more about them later.

For now, there is a gloriously modelled area to explore known as the Slums. Any cyberpunk fans will absolutely love the dark alleyways, neon signs and Kowloon-inspired rooftops. You leap from place to place, largely solving small puzzles (sometimes with hilarious results) and scavenging certain items. You will also find yourself having conversations with the locals quite a bit. At any time after they first speak, you have the option to show them an item. If successful, this will progress you further. It’s largely a great system encouraging you to remember points of interest, although my only small gripe is that at one time it feels as if you’re simply on a hunt for items and not much else. This game also has mainly stealth elements with no combat in sight for the most part. That being said, the game I had been playing most recently has been Dead Cells; a very fast, very mobile combat-based procedural 2-D adventure with lots of loot and abilities. I probably just had that itch having not played something narrative for a while. 

This brings me to an important point about this game. If you are somebody who loves a combination of collectibles, combat, abilities etc. you may find yourself somewhat disappointed here. This adventure is more of a narrative piece and although there aren’t that many items, everything has its place. At most you have 8 pieces of sheet music for a fellow with a guitar and a bunch of memories to recover for B-12. None of this is strictly necessary as the only rewards are badges that get attached to the jacket our ginger friend bears, which don’t serve a purpose later as far as I can tell. Speaking of that jacket though, one of the most entertaining cat behaviours (the moment which made me laugh out loud) was when B-12 makes the jacket appear on our furry friend. Any cat-lover can relate to this, but when the jacket appears, our stray hero doesn’t appear to like it and their body bows down at the rear as if trying to dislodge it. Also there are many other fun little cat behaviours to be found, such as scratching sofas and rugs. The charming moments that catch you off guard are numerous in this game, but I’ll save some for you to discover for yourself!

The Outsiders’ Mission

Let’s go back to the main mission of the game. Our friend Momo is part of a collective who call themselves the Outsiders. When you first meet Momo however, he seems quite troubled and almost at the end of his tether, as the others have not been seen or heard from for quite a while. Their collective mission is to get to the outside world by any means they can find. It turns out the stars in the sky are not real, astonishingly enough I didn’t notice this. They are concentric circle constellations and it turns out they are lights on a very large ceiling containing the city. You get on to find and return notebooks of the outsiders, found somewhere in the slum, to raise Momo’s spirits.

If at any point you happen to get lost in the rooftops, it’s important to remember that crucial ‘meow’ button. Lights and other apparatus will light up to hint at the place you need to go. As you adventure on, there will be memory points along the way that B-12 will be able to use to remember things. Both you and B-12 will learn more about how life was before the machines, helping to flesh out the environment we find ourselves in. I’d like to mention here that there is not only the slums either, there are other places you will visit as you progress your quest. 

You’ll come across areas such as an almost 1984-esque policed city and other areas that are actually quite terrifying. The one thing that will keep striking you is just how beautiful, detailed and varied the environments are. When you walk inside a flat or bar or shop, everything from the textures to lighting feels so varied and meticulous, making them unique to each other and always hitting the right mood in association with the character(s). The other thing that makes it different here is that the details are on a smaller scale. The environments can afford to be smaller and more effort can be injected into the smaller rooms. I frequently found myself in awe and took so many screenshots that it was unexpectedly difficult to pick the right ones for this review! 

As an example, a particular bar I walked into later in the game had a few bi-pedals sitting at the counter, some small wooden tables to the right and a pool table to the left. I spent a few minutes checking out those tables as they looked downright real, and had that mahogany wood finish you usually would see in actual bars. You can leap on those tables, the bar and even the pool table. You can walk on top to ruin the perfect ball set up and swat the cue ball around. Anyone that has met me knows I can never turn down a game of Cat Pool.

At this point it becomes quite difficult to continue as I would not wish to spoil important plot points; the game is largely narrative driven after all. However, if you would like to know some profound thoughts I had on this game after finishing, read on. 

Endgame Epiphany (SPOILERS PRESENT)

You will know when the time comes, but an opportunity to visit the controlling tier of the city will become available. By the time you have learned all that you have, you may experience a sense of shock as you enter an incredibly clean and functional environment, still operating with robots for numbers as names as per their programming. As you walk through here, you feel a strange anger consume you. Here there are no Zurks or other dangers, and as you walk you continue to learn that every other level was left to fend for themselves. Once you hit the main control room, it is time to open the lid to the city. This is where the outside finally opens, and it is a truly epic event. 

Once I had completed the game, I had to stop for a while and think about everything that happened during this adventure and had a couple of realisations. I had come to think about how a lot of games I play are generally incentivised by collectibles and other trinkets. This game took an opposite approach in a way; the items, characters and the parkour system were all there to further the narrative in a focused and uncomplicated way, which served to immerse you more deeply with less distractions. There was no fear of missing out here. And if that wasn’t enough, at the end you realise that you, a mere feline, somehow did all this. You saved an entire generation of sentient beings, solving a centuries long problem that they were otherwise unable to themselves!

Even though the game was generally speaking shorter than other adventures (took me just over 6hrs to complete to a satisfactory level), at no point did I feel distracted and everything felt very pure and justified. I was left thinking about all those poor citizens that now feel as much as humans, and how they were left  discarded and forgotten. But I was also given hope for them and left with a heartwarming (although in a way bittersweet) end.

Summary

This game is a masterpiece in its own right. It successfully puts the player into the shoes of a (particularly smart) cat that never strays far from its core formula. Every behaviour moves you in some way, manifesting itself as everything from joy to sadness, producing many moments of relatability to anyone who has ever owned a cat. The environments are vibrant, detailed, unique and very much alive, working well with the brilliant cyberpunk-esque vibe created by the sound. The characters are genuine and you find yourself caring a lot for them throughout. For anyone that may want combat or incentivised collectibles, this won’t be for you. For everyone else however, take a moment out of your time to treat yourself to this unique and satisfying adventure of a certain stray feline that defied all odds to become the unexpected furry protagonist we never knew we needed. I sincerely hope this adventure is experienced by you too!