Stray has a lot in common with other adventure games. You must solve puzzles, navigate dense urban environments and use stealth to avoid powerful enemies. There are characters to befriend and things to collect. But there’s one key difference between Stray and its contemporaries: you play as a cat. This may sound like a small twist or even a gimmick, but in reality, the change in perspective makes Stray feel refreshingly new. You’re still in a big, complex world, but now you’re seeing it from ground level. It changes everything from the exploration to the puzzles. And combined with a bittersweet story that veers between joy, heartbreak, and even the occasional horror, it makes for one of the best games of the year so far.
In Stray, you play as a nameless cat who finds himself separated from his feline friends at the start of the game and plunged into an underground world inhabited by robots instead of humans. Initially, the goal is simple: to return to the surface. However, the search quickly turns into something more. Eventually you are joined by a cute drone named B12 and the mysteries of the world begin to pile up. On your way to the surface, you rise through the layers of robot society—literally—learning more about not only their lives and history, but what the hell happened to humans. On top of that are the zurki, a mysterious swarm of bug-like monsters that eat seemingly anything. This includes the robots, which keeps the machines confined to various underground slums, as well as cute little cats.
The story also provides a nice twist on the classic silent character. Unlike, say, Link from The Legend of Zelda, it makes sense here that your character never speaks because he’s a cat. Sometimes you can communicate through translation from your drone friend, but more often than not, Stray is a game where your actions do the talking. You can please the robots by doing favors big and small—they can range from helping a robo-grandmother weave a cozy poncho out of electrical cables or reuniting a father and son by traversing perilous, goblin-infested canals. Stray’s story is relatively short—I finished the game in about seven hours—but it covers a lot in that runtime, with topics ranging from wealth inequality to environmental disaster, not to mention the all-important fate of the cat itself.
In terms of how it’s played, Stray spans several genres, depending on the moment. Much of your time in the beginning is spent figuring out how to get around a very vertical city as a small cat. The controls are a bit different from a typical third-person adventure: while you can move around freely, the jump button is contextual, so you can only jump when you see an X appear on a ledge. It took some getting used to – and it can slow things down when your life is on the line during an action sequence – but it also makes a lot of sense. In Stray, movement is often a steady process of planning as you chart your course up or down a building or across a treacherous path. It’s a lot like watching a house cat methodically climb over furniture and counters to get to the top of a refrigerator.
Getting around involves not only planning the right route, but also solving some usually easy-to-decipher environmental puzzles. They can be as simple as knocking down a wooden plank to create a bridge, but are often more involved, with multiple steps that can require everything from repairing machinery to scaring robots with a well-placed meow. (There is a button on the controller dedicated solely to meowing.) This is no ordinary action game where you have a lot of abilities at your disposal. Outside of a short part of the game, you don’t have a weapon, so all you can really do is run, jump, meow, and perform other context-sensitive actions like scratching your neck or hitting something off a shelf. The experience is more about exploring this densely packed world, looking for clues and figuring out the best way to proceed given your limited feline skills. And while some of these actions exist in other games, the very fact that you’re a cat, with limited options and a ground-level perspective, makes them feel very different in practice.
However, there are a few action sequences that, however brief, add the necessary amount of tension to the experience. Early on you’ll be dealing with swarms of Zurks, which means either running away or using very limited weaponry to take them down. These moments can be horrifying — they’re reminiscent of the deadly rat swarms in 2019’s A Plague Tale: Innocence — but they can also be frustrating. A few times I found myself dying repeatedly until I was able to memorize the bug patterns and plot a safe escape. It felt more annoying than exhausting, though those moments were rare, and the game has a very generous checkpoint system so you’re never forced to replay large sections. Later the action switches to stealth as you have to completely avoid robots to infiltrate various locations. (This, of course, includes hiding in cardboard boxes.)
You move back and forth between these moments of action and adventure, and perhaps the most impressive thing about Stray is how everything flows. I never felt compelled to spend too much time on one thing. As soon as a part of the game started to feel boring – whether it was running from zombies or jumping across rooftops – I was able to move on to something else. The same goes for history. It starts out as a simple quest at home, but as you move up through the different levels of the robot world and learn more about this improbable future, the stakes—both personal and existential—get much higher. The ending is beautiful and tragic.
The experience is also full of quiet moments if you want. Stray gives you plenty of time to just be a cat. You can scratch carpets and sofas, make a complete mess of an ongoing board game, or lie on top of a napping bot for as long as you like. These actions are sometimes necessary to solve puzzles, but more often they’re just fun to mess around with and help you get that feline mindset. The first time the cat puts on the harness is one of the funniest moments I’ve ever experienced in a game.
Stray lets you slow down, but also doesn’t overstay its welcome. I played the whole thing in two sessions because I couldn’t put it down: I just had to know what happened next. When you mix that carefully plotted narrative with gameplay that lets you meow on command, you have an itchy experience I didn’t even know I had.
Stray launches on July 19 for PS4, PS5 and Steam.
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