Stray

Stray got a lot of hype. If you were completely oblivious to internet discourse in the weeks leading up to its release, allow me to provide a comprehensive explanation of Stray’s features and how they interacted with the main underlying currents of pop culture at the time in a way to produce one of the most anticipated games of 2022:

In Stray, you play as a cat.

…Hm? No, that’s it. Were you expecting more?

Huh. When you take a step back, that’s actually a pretty small base to place so much hype on, isn’t it?

So, how was it? Is Stray the cat’s meow, or does it belong in the litter box?

Let’s just say I’m more of a dog person.

Stray is an extremely polished, extremely average game. For me, the core issue with Stray is that it is not a game about being a cat, but a game where you just happen to be a cat.

The first chapter of the game is also the strongest. We’re introduced to the stray, its family, and the world of the game. We fall down a shaft from the lush overworld to the decrepit underground, establishing the primary goal of returning to our family. As we explore the underground ruins, storytelling is environmental and contextual. I was actually really impressed here, as Stray needed to simultaneously balance two levels of storytelling: the story we, the player, can understand from the game world by viewing it as a human, and the story the cat undergoes as it explores the game as a cat. The game needed to provide environments that we could understand and contextualize, and that a cat could conceivably navigate through—and succeeded at this. The introductory chapter also features one of the neatest hint systems I’ve ever seen in a game. (If you know, you know.)

And then we get a buddy and it becomes a generic adventure game.

While the first chapter of the game has no dialogue or narration, once our buddy joins we can talk to NPCs as normal. Which boggled my mind. We can only talk to NPCs when our buddy is with us, so it’s clear that the buddy is the one serving as the communicator, but… does that mean our buddy can talk to us? Why? How did our buddy learn Catonese? Why is our buddy the only one who knows Catonese? (In the context of the game, there’s no reason there should only be one person who knows it.) More importantly, can the stray understand our buddy at the same level and precision as a human speaking a human language?

There’s no explanation for any of this. Our buddy just shows up and starts talking to us. Which normally might not be a big deal, but the shift from silent, environmental storytelling to direct dialogue was jarring! “There’s no need to think so hard about this, it’s just a game,” is how this strawman I’ve just propped up might respond. But that’s just it: deflecting the criticism in that way is admitting that Stray is just “a game,” and not a great game or a masterpiece or something along those lines.

I liked being a cat and doing cat things. And then Stray snatched that away and replaced it with a generic plot of the kind you might find in a 80s sci-fi movie. Without even attempting to explain how a cat could understand and do all the things it does! There’s one part of the game where we need to install advanced electronics. How the heck is a cat supposed to do that?! Thinking back, meeting the buddy was the first sequence where we need to make the cat take actions that make sense for a human solving a puzzle but are entirely contrived for a random cat. At that point I was willing to give the game some leeway, but little did I know it was the beginning of the end. If the main selling point of the game is being a cat, I want to be a cat, not a generic video game protagonist in a cat’s body!

While I’m at it, the title Stray doesn’t even make any sense. A “stray” typically refers to a domesticated animal that is wild or lose, but cats are no longer domesticated in the world of Stray, so it doesn't seem like it should apply anymore. (Maybe the title is supposed to refer to how the cat “strayed” from its family but just let me have this, okay?)

Putting the story aside, as a platforming adventure game Stray is incredibly slick and polished. I thought the graphics were great and detailed, and I only played on a PS4, so I assume the game looks even better on a PS5. Movement is fluid, and the cat’s animations look natural and graceful. The main mechanics are just running and jumping, but jumping is elegantly implemented: whenever a jump is possible, the jump prompt will appear where you’ll land. While jump physics are often the bane of 3D platformers, in Stray you can always see when you can jump and where it’ll take you. Also, unlike Dark Souls where your greatest nemesis is shin-high walls, in Stray you can cross nearly every gap that looks like you can cross.

(Okay, if we want to get technical, the main mechanic is obviously the dedicated meow button, which perhaps should be added to every video game in existence, with running and jumping being unimportant auxiliary systems.)

That being said, it did feel like the developers ran out of steam as the game progressed. Even the jump from the first to second town is stark: the first town has several side quests and gets visited multiple times, while the second town has a single side quest and just gets immediately passed through. The people in each town also all complain about how dangerous it is to go outside and how isolated they are, but… While the route between the first and second towns is long and arduous, after that the remaining towns are basically all right next to each other, so it felt bizarre how none of them appeared to interact with each other.

Stray is short so it doesn’t overstay its welcome, but might feel a bit overpriced if you purchase it at sticker price. It’s a cute, incredibly polished adventure game, but a few hours of platforming tied together by a generic plot just wasn’t enough to wow me. Even if I got to do it as a cat. After all, the game isn’t about being a cat, it’s a generic sci-fi story where our silent protagonist just happens to be a cat. It’s good, and even probably worth playing, but I don’t expect it to have nine lives’ worth of longevity.