The team at Blue Twelve has also nailed what is, in my opinion, the most important aspect of being a cat: pure chaos.
The developers say this was done in service of really making you feel like a cat who always nails his jumps flawlessly, but it has the welcome side-effect of eliminating any potential gameplay frustrations that could arise from failed jumps during tricky platforming sections. Once you’re within range of a platforming, you’ll see a button prompt which, when pressed will always perfectly execute the jump. It doesn’t require any precision or timing to execute. The platforming (if you can call it that) is far simpler than it looks. He walks, saunters, sprints, and scampers with all the grace and specificity you can expect from a stray cat that’s been on the streets a long time.
The cat is incredibly expressive and meticulously animated (I was surprised to learn that Blue Twelve didn’t use motion capture for some of the movements). Everything you’ve heard about Stray being the ultimate cat fantasy is true. The star of the show, to nobody’s surprise, is the cat. Characters like Guardian, Clementine, or Momo are designed well enough to tell you everything you need to know about their personality before they’ve said a word of dialogue. These robots are overflowing with personality and writing both in their writing and animation (there is no voice acting), to the point that I could easily tell them apart based on their silhouettes alone. The general rhythms of Stray have you going back and forth between linear dungeons and open-ended exploration in one of three small hubs where you interact with the city’s robot denizens and take part in the occasional side quest. I don’t want to say any more than this about the story because, to my surprise, it ended up being my favourite part of the game. Soon after you meet up with a droid named B12 who is able to translate the robots’ language, and what follows is an adventure that leads you to uncover the true nature of the dead city and hopefully find a way back to your pack.
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The adventure begins when our furry protagonist, one of a pack of stray cats living in what looks like a post-apocalypse, falls into a hole and finds himself in a dead city full of sentient robots and deadly blobby creatures called ‘zurks,’ with not a sign of a living human being. What this is mostly the case, Stray is also a thoroughly story-driven game with some truly excellent writing, that felt more like a cross between NieR: Automata and INSIDE than it did, say, Ratchet and Clank. Going by the trailers, I had assumed it would be something akin to a PS2-era mascot platformer about a cat and his robot drone buddy.
The fact that it’s some sort of “cat simulator” has been an inextricable part of the game’s public image, even if it wasn’t necessarily a part of its marketing. The game has built a reputation for itself as “the cat game” over the last few years, to the point where even my non-gaming cat-owning friends have heard about it. I don’t know if everyone else’s experience from the trailer was the same as mine because, if I had to use just one word to describe Stray, it would be “surprising.”Įvery aspect of Stray, from its story to its soundtrack to its densely detailed level-design and polished gameplay is surprising, considering it is Blue Twelve Studio’s debut title. From the trailers I had assumed it would be some sort of 3D platformer in a vaguely cyberpunk-y setting, but beyond that it was anyone’s guess. Despite it being one of my most anticipated games of the new generation (thanks to an absolutely excellent-looking trailer at the PS5 reveal showcase two years ago), I actually had little to no idea of what to expect from Stray.
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