“Large-scale worlds would be a lot more fun as a little furball”
Touring the post-apocalypse as a cat in STRAY
I SPOKE WITH ROBOTS THAT WONDER WHAT IT WAS LIKE TO BE A HUMAN
The post-apocalypse is much nicer when you’re a foot off the ground, it turns out. Stray, the game where you’re a tabby cat in a post-human world of robots, might not have the most imaginative take on the cyberpunk genre, but makes a compelling argument for why swapping out all the gruff dad and stoic lady protagonists for a cat is the easiest way to get everyone to play your game.
Developer BlueTwelve Studio cleverly hides the fact that Stray is just a point-and-click adventure game except your mouse is a paw and there are plenty of things to swipe at or perforate. I spoke with robots that wonder what it was like to be a human while wrapped in clothing and discarded remnants of the things they left behind. There are light puzzles to solve, which took me only a few leaps and pats to figure out, and the reward is a playfully grim story where the metallic citizens take their first step toward forgetting the past.
What I like most about Stray is how tangible its vision of a humanless dystopia is and how long you get to play in it. The stakes are low as a cat, and the game allows you to skip through its alleyways and shops while making small talk with the people found in them. Halfway through the game, you stumble into its Midtown section. It’s a collage of signs and neon lights with buildings stacked on top of each other like Lego. You can hear the clanks of a ramen shop and the radio of the street dancers a block away. Midtown pulls from the real Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong, and while Stray doesn’t make an attempt to engage with its fraught history, it does a stunning job at visually adapting what was one of the most densely populated cities in the world.
CURL UP
I could spend many hours in Midtown, taking screenshots and finding small vignettes that suggest a story all to themselves. Stray is at its best when it pauses and lets you squeeze into a corner and observe all the people around you before dozing off into a cat nap. It’s like those aesthetic backgrounds that people load onto their desktops with Wallpaper Engine, but you can create a scene wherever you can nudge your furry cat-self into.
Stray makes me want to mod a cat into Grand Theft Auto V or drop a feline into Skyrim. Large-scale worlds would be a lot more fun as a little furball. The collective imagination for games that make you play a human is fairly limited. I think I’ve saved the world enough. Stray is the most compelling example for why more games should pass on people more often and put you in the hands of something else. Preferably more cats, please.