Game Thoughts: Stray
In 2022, developer BlueTwelve Studio and publisher Annapurna Interactive released Stray, an immersive, sci-fi roleplaying game in which the player takes on the roll of a young, orange tabby cat who lives in a grown-over structure with their three siblings. While exploring one morning, the cat falls into a walled-in city, which has been sealed off for centuries to prevent “contamination” from the Outside (capitalized in the game, as “the Outside” is considered by most to be a myth). At first, the cat is completely alone as they traverse this post-apocalyptic world occupied by sentient robots and tiny, destructive, and hungry bug-like creatures called Zurks. Then they meet B-12, a small droid that helps the cat through the city by translating robot speech, signs, and more.
I’ve wanted to play Stray since I first saw the trailer, and last week one of my best friends kindly gifted it to me on Steam. I completed the story in approximately 7 hours and I loved it. I also cried multiple times. You see, the sweet orange cat in Stray is much like our sweet orange cat, Shrimp, who was also separated from his littermate as a baby and was then adopted with his sister, Scampi, so he wouldn’t be lonely.
As you can imagine, playing Stray with Shrimp sleeping soundly on my desk was a bit of an emotional rollercoaster.
Shrimp disclaimer (Shrimpsclaimer?) aside, I really, really enjoyed Stray. The mechanics are easy to master and the story moves at a solid pace, with plenty of time between main missions to explore the world, meet NPCs, complete side quests, and marvel at the genuine beauty of the story, graphics, music, and sound editing. This game won Best Independent Game and Best Debut Indie Game at the 2022 Game Awards, Most Innovative Gameplay at the 2023 Steam Awards, Best Sound Design for an Indie Game at the 2023 Game Audio Network Guild Awards, and Best Debut at the 2023 Game Developers Choice Awards. It also received a slew of high-profile nominations, and it deserves every last ounce of that praise.
From the jump, I was completely immersed in Stray. The opening cut scene made me feel as if I was truly in the game, the sound so finely detailed and well-balanced that it pulled me out of my apartment and into the overgrown tunnel with the orange tabby and their siblings. Learning how to move, meow (!), and interact with NPCs and objects was swift, and the “tutorial” stage (which I consider to be everything before falling into the city) is brief but interesting. The HUD doesn’t interrupt gameplay to teach you how to do things and there’s no real sense of urgency until you enter the city and have to avoid the Zurks (and Sentinels, which come into play during the endgame). Its controls are also accessible, with built-in captions, haptics, and customizable button mapping. (I used an Xbox Wireless controller and played on PC via Steam.)
Since there is fantasy violence in Stray and it is possible to “die” (though not permanently), you can turn off “show cat death” in the settings. Instead of seeing the cat get overwhelmed, you’ll see a black screen with continuation options. There are moments when you will see the cat limp, as well as moments where the cat is clearly in emotional distress. I am incredibly sensitive to these things in real life, on social media, and in fiction. At no point did I feel like the developers of Stray capitalize on or otherwise exploit harm against animals, and I was able to move through the game without feeling overly gross or disturbed.
In between moments of intense urgency, the game encourages exploration at every level. Because you’re playing a cat, you can squeeze into small spaces, slip under gates, scratch at doors to make someone open them, push through cracked open windows, and more. You can pick things up and carry them with you as you jump to new heights, and when you start working with B-12, you gain the freedom to download information and transfer it to others. For example: in the slums, where you first encounter civilization, you can collect pieces of sheet music for an android with a functional guitar made from scrap.
By completing such side quests, you earn badges, which have no function within the game but are nice to have anyway. And if you find all of B-12’s memories, five of which are main story elements and more of which require deeper exploration, you get a fancy rainbow-ish backpack to replace your boring black one.
As mentioned above, Stray made me cry multiple times, both because I have such a deep, deep love for cats and because the story is so richly detailed and lovely that it’s impossible not to get super attached to the characters. Rooting for these androids is easy because all they want to do is see the sky after dreaming of it for eons. Their incorporation of human customs into their culture is strange and lovely, and the way they interact with you as a small, vivacious feline makes the soft part of my heart feel even mushier.
I rarely love a game so much that I can sit down and play through the entire thing (or most of it, depending on story length) in one sitting. Once I started Stray, however, I couldn’t walk away. I live-texted many of my feelings to the friend who gifted it to me, and I know I’ll be thinking about it for a long time. I’m planning to replay soon to complete the collections I missed and see what else there is to explore. I just loved this playthrough experience on every level and I’m so grateful.
Stray is available for PC, Mac, PlayStation, and Xbox.
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