Post Script
Translating the meanings of Stray’s fictional language
Before you ever meet B-12, the hovering drone that will be your companion through Stray, he speaks to you through the dead city. First, the neon letters of an old chapel flicker on unsteadily– or rather just enough of them to spell out ‘HELP’. If we’re initially unsure whether this is a diegetic occurrence or the game blurring the lines of UI and level design, any ambiguity is quickly washed away by the next sight: a bank of televisions that show a clipart icon of a cat’s face and the instruction ‘Follow me’. We obey, and thus so does the cat.
After reaching B-12 – a process that requires finding the drone body, downloading his consciousness and powering it on – he speaks to us directly, the way people often do when alone with an animal. This dialogue (or rather monologue) is written out in English – a fact we only mention because all around us are signs written in a glyph language, the same one used for the game’s chapter titles. There’s a narrative justification here, if you’re willing to dig: B-12 is a relic of the human era, and the glyph language was created afterwards by the robots.
It’s a basic letter-substitution, with many characters resembling their roman equivalents closely enough that you can parse occasional snippets of text just by squinting the right way. In that sense, it’s reminiscent of the year’s other great gaming cipher: the one that fills the pages of Tunic’s in-game manual. That took things considerably further, using the language not only to build mystery but also to generate puzzles and obfuscate key mechanics. In both games, though, your lack of fluency puts you in a similar mindset to your protagonist, as they find themselves lost in an unfamiliar world.
Of course, there’s also a simple aesthetic quality at work. As anyone with an ill-advised tattoo in a script they can’t read will tell you, there’s something inherently appealing about letter forms that your eye processes as shapes – just look at Tunic’s gorgeous maps, and the way the glyphs become part of the image. There’s a risk of exoticisation here, though, and we’d note that Tunic and Stray are both looking to Asia. In the former case, it’s nostalgia for untranslated Japanese game boxes and manuals. Here, the language is just one of the visual inspirations the game takes from Hong Kong. The deployment is not too dissimilar to how fellow French studio Sloclap used real Chinese characters in the world and UI of Sifu, but here the language is made up, putting all players – regardless of how multilingual they might be in real life – in the position of the outsider tourist.
When the time comes to speak with the locals, then, you require a translator, a role filled by B-12. In a neat touch, all dialogue boxes remain on his side of the screen – a reminder that you’re not reading the words of the robot themselves (which are heard, in Stray’s only voiced dialogue, as an abstract series of buzzes and bleeps) but the version relayed by your companion in English. What’s not entirely clear is why your character is able to understand him. Partly because they have lived their entire life in a posthuman world, but mostly because they are a cat.
This might sound like a plot-hole nitpick, but consider what it says about the relationship between player and protagonist. These messages aren’t addressed to your character, really, but to you, the player. Consider once more Tunic, in which you play as a fox in Link cosplay but also as the person beyond the screen, rifling through manuals and pause menus in an attempt to decipher them. Stray doesn’t put quite so much distance between you and your animal avatar but, while it does a brilliant job of embodying the cat, it’s not especially interested in putting you in that body – hence the abstraction of its point-andclick jumping – or in its head.
It’s because the cat feels so real on the screen that we choose to view the game’s story as a kind of extended accidental collaboration, the same way that Godzilla sometimes helps the humans without ever realising it. There’s a line from B-12 late in the game: “Now we need to do what we do best. Me, I’ll hack the machines, and you destroy some stuff!” Success just happens to involve scratching your claws against metal panels and jumping up on the furniture – things you wanted to do anyway, and have been doing all game long, one trigger button per paw making clawing a particularly satisfying activity, with no save-the-world objective in mind.
This is a reading that the game very nearly supports, but the fact remains that you conveniently follow every order the robots give – which isn’t very catlike, is it? These animals are famous for doing precisely as they choose. Any remaining ambiguity is undone by the fact that these words aren’t spoken, which would allow you to hear rather than listen, but read. It’s easy to imagine a version of Stray that committed to its alien language fully, like playing a game in its native language with the subtitles turned off, and frankly we’re not sure its story would be any poorer for it. It’s not that the writing is bad, as such, but at least as much is communicated to you through the game’s animations, music and staging. In other words: if only you couldn’t talk to the robots. Now, that would be interesting.
The fact remains that you conveniently follow every order the robots give – which isn’t very catlike, is it?