The cat’s out of the bag — and probably all over your Twitter feed.
“Stray,” a new video game for SONY Sony, +3.42% PlayStation and Microsoft MSFT, +2.08% Windows, lets players explore an underground, cyberpunk city as a gingerbread man trying to make his way back to his family you are
The $29.99 third-person adventure-puzzle platformer — from French development studio BlueTwelve and published by Annapurna Interactive — has generated a lot of buzz since it was first unveiled at the PS5 launch event in 2020 (More a new trailer released on June 2 has already been viewed more than 1.7 million times on PlayStation’s YouTube account.)
And now the long-awaited “cat game” is here — and players and their feline friends are already obsessed.
Some mild spoilers follow: The gist of the game is that you play a lost stray cat navigating an underground city inhabited by robots. The goal is to return to the surface world where your feline friends live. Your stray is soon teamed up with a sentient drone named B12 (who can talk to the humanoid robots about your feline nature) and the two of you explore the city and solve puzzles to find your way home, discovering what happened to all the people along the way — while avoiding hungry monsters who want to eat this cute kitty almost as much as the players.
“Stray” was trending on Twitter both Monday and Tuesday around the game’s launch, attracting more than 363,000 tweets by late Tuesday afternoon. And perhaps the most adorable early trend involved gamers posting videos of their own cats transfixed by the nameless main character with paws.
Game developers BlueTwelve Studio were not immediately available for comment. But they revealed in a PlayStation blog post that they’ve made sure the strays at the heart of the game look and feel as much like real cats as possible. (Well, except for showing cat butts, obviously.) And the end product seems to resonate with both real-life cats and their humans.
Some dogs also got into it.
The PlayStation blog post also introduced the three cats that inspired the game’s lead cat. They include an orange tabby named Murtaugh, a former homeless person himself, who was found under a car in Montpellier, France. He now lives with the co-owners of BlueTwelve Studio. And a hairless sphynx named Oscar was the muse for the lead cat animator — who reportedly animated the cats by hand rather than a motion-capture suit — to tease out the intricacies of a cat’s movements as it runs, jumps, scratches, “boos.” the muzzle” and climbs. Both cats were regular visitors to the development team’s studio. “Having real cats under our noses throughout the development was of course extremely helpful in many ways,” the blog post said.
A real-life rescue cat, Murtaugh, inspired the feline example of “Stray.”
Studio BlueTwelve
Early reviews of the game were largely positive, with the Washington Post calling it “meow-stereo” and the Verge calling it “one of the best games of the year so far.” But some critics have also said that the game doesn’t always “stand on its feet,” so to speak, and its charm can wear off quickly.
Still, much of the highest praise was given to how well the developers captured the feeling of being a cat – from the way the game’s strays stretch when they stand up, rub against each other, scratch trees or casually knock over bottles as they gloss over the fact that there is a “dedicated meow button”.
Which is perhaps why “Stray” is like cat grass for gamers to share on social media – the home of the cat meme. After all, there are millions of cat videos on YouTube, and a Google search for “cat meme” pulls up about 198 million results. (In fact, a cat in Japan named Motimaru broke the Guinness World Record for the most viewed cat on YouTube last August with 619,586,260 views.)
There’s even a growing volume of cat-focused YouTube videos (aka “cat TV”) featuring footage of birds and squirrels to keep cats occupied while they’re home alone. Maybe now cat owners can also leave the “Stray” loading screen or initial gameplay tutorial working for their fur babies too.
Add Comment