Video games: Living a cat’s life in Stray
“Do you love cats?” asked William
Hughes in The A.V. Club. If you do—if you “love watching them move, jump, swat things off shelves, make a mess, etc.,” you are going to want to play Stray, a long-awaited new game from Blue Twelve Studio and Annapurna Interactive. Stray is a platform game in which you play as an ordinary orange tabby that gets stranded in a post-apocalyptic underground city and have to puzzle your way out. But its “single biggest selling point” is “the loving way your feline protagonist has been animated,” with “every motion pulled from familiar cat movements and behaviors.” Mechanical skills are barely required as you try to secure escape across several hours of play: “You run, you meow, you occasionally scratch a wall, and you jump.” And the city is nothing special: “It sometimes feels kludged together from a Lego stack of ready-made video-game tropes.” Still, “if you accept that the primary reason for playing the game is to, well, be a cat, then it’s frequently sublime.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever spent so much time in a video game doing absolutely nothing,” said Alyse Stanley in The Washington Post. “I delightfully scratched up furniture and toppled book stacks and meowed a million times.” I also napped a lot, and looked more closely at my surroundings as I did. But Stray doesn’t lack in narrative interest or tension.
The city, inhabited solely by robots and pesky creatures called Zurks, feels alive, and you come to realize that the robots have created a society on the ashes of a vanished human culture. Yes, the third act flags and “the controls are finicky at times,” but Stray is mostly an “enrapturing” experience. “It’s adorable, it’s devastating,” and “it unspools a haunting thread about humanity.”