Perhaps it started as simple wish-fulfilment (I mean, everybody wants to be a cat) but to build this tantalising premise into a full game is a grander undertaking. With Stray, BlueTwelve Studio have succeeded in combining the joy of cat-simulation with a wonderfully evocative world and a subtle yet poignant story that ends up being a lot more about humans and robots than it is about felines. Although it may feel slight, and some may find it most memorable for its premise – which, after all, was teased for so long before release – Stray is a joyful and interesting game, impressively coherent from its playful cat mechanics to its philosophical musings on artificial intelligence.
The Cat
Stray is about a cat who falls from a derelict, overgrown overworld into a grimy, cyberpunk walled city inhabited by robots (known as companions). As the cat, you seek to escape the city with your adoptive, amnesiac robot sidekick, B12. You travel first through The Slums and then up to Midtown, with various smaller areas that connect or branch off these two hubs. The general consensus on Stray is very positive, with the common caveat that some of the non-cat mechanics are less fun than the basics: leaping around and meowing.
It is true that being a cat is a joy. Looking around will reveal button prompts on reachable ledges. Pressing X will see you hop up to your new perch, with recognisably feline grace that suffuses all the game’s animations. Hold X and you can chain jumps, inviting comparison to Spiderman’s “Hold R2 to Parkour” feature. It is all incredibly satisfying, and traversal is an appropriately large part of gameplay. And then there is the meow button, which you can press at any time, including during a cutscene. Playing on PS5, the meow comes from the Dualsense speakers in your hands, as does the purring when you find a spot to sleep. There are also specific places in the world where you can scratch, using alternating presses of L2/R2 to claw at a carpet or a sofa.
The environmental puzzle are never very taxing and minimal repetition goes a long way. Most are solved using basic cat mechanics, every instance of which feels gently clever. Clawing at some doors will provoke their opening. Destroying CCTV cameras is accomplished by jumping on them. The non-cat mechanics are a little disappointing, like the B12-mounted light, which acts as a weapon to repel small enemies (Zurks) that chase you in the city’s lower levels. The game’s latter half features sentinels – hovering, patrolling drones that require a stealthy approach. These encounters are also less fun, best thought of as extensions of the cat’s nimble route-finding.
The World
Indeed, the routes you find are fantastic in the early game. The Slums offer vertical exploration everywhere, giving the feeling cats must have: that all the world is their oyster. The streets are narrow, tall and labyrinthine, filled with detail even across the rooftops. It provides all the giddiness of a massive jungle gym, as you complete a series of interlocking quests to progress. Later environments offer less of that freedom, mostly staying very linear until the second hub area, Midtown, and even that has fewer exploration options, and little by way of quests. What Midtown does have in spades, however, is brilliant detail and vibrant world building.
Of all the environments, it is Midtown that hews closest to established cyberpunk tropes, decorated with neon (with robot text standing in for East Asian kanji) and occupied by an authoritarian police force. There is still vibrancy in the Slums, though not of the colourful kind. The lowest part of the city is a sandy brown, dirty and a little bleak but there you will encounter a busker for whom you can collect tunes, as well as a snoozing robot on the rooftops. Everywhere in Stray, the companions you meet are lively characters. Admittedly, their dialogue is usually restricted to one line, but their look – and that of the places they inhabit – is a painterly expression of Stray‘s distinctive world: full of life, but trapped in the artificial ecosystem of the city.
The Message (SPOILERS)
For the most part, the story is the set-dressing. It is all those familiar cyberpunk elements, coupled with that painterly world-building. The game’s central mystery (why is the world like this?) is gradually revealed through B12’s collectable memories. We learn that there was a Plague and that humans sealed the city in a vain attempt to survive. However, it is not until the very last lines of dialogue that this mystery really comes into its own. Revealing that opening the city will destroy itself, B12 says, “I thought I needed to carry on the memories of humanity. To hold on to the past. But I see a future in the companions. And you.” In light of this, Stray is an exercise in humanising robots, in empathising with them and eventually forging a kind of a liberation. The cat is a vehicle for empathy, transferred from B12 (the last connection to humanity), through us the player-character, eventually connecting with the companions.
We have come through many stories of AI. In recent times this journey has led us to stories of empathy and liberation (Ex Machina, Detroit: Become Human and many more) and Stray adds another voice. I have not encountered another story in which humans are quite so absent – indeed, in sacrificing itself, B12 eliminates the human element altogether. Usually, we need a human character who provides us access to non-human characters. In this case, a cat gives us that access.
In shifting the conclusion of the story to the human/robot relationship, it can feel like a certain disregard is shown to the feline element – the OG tantalising premise. However, I would argue that from this emerges one last cleverness. The cat is an Outsider in every sense: it comes from the outside, explores a cat-less world, and while it does show emotion, it maintains that classic feline disaffected distance. As I mused on this character at the end of the game, I realised that it was the perfect avatar for me, the player. I come from outside the game, I exist on another plane to the in-game characters, and while I might be moved by the story I will inevitably move on quickly (and probably meow through every emotional moment). Perhaps the cat is not just the tantalising premise, but in fact a comment on the creature most suited to the role of video game protagonist, ever. Meow indeed.
Ben Jackson 