There’s a lot of buzz about Stray right now, due to it being released during a fairly dry period for new releases, and more importantly, how you’ll be playing as an incredibly cute cat. Unfortunately, what I think a lot of people are going to find out this week, is that it very quickly forgets that and gets incredibly…gamey. I didn’t expect to be playing as a robot, zapping mutant drops, for example. The following contains spoilers about the gameplay elements of Stray (how you play, not why you play), without going into the story itself at all. The opening of Stray is simply wonderful. No nonsense, no boring scenes, the camera gently sweeps over four kittens living in the overgrown remains of a dam, before settling behind the collection’s ginger critter, and you’re in control. The first thing you do is interact with your brothers and sisters, each of which is a beautiful moment of beautifully observed kitty behavior. The animations are perfect and anyone of any semblance of decency will cringe at the screen. Screenshot: BlueTwelve Studio / Kotaku After some sleep, the four cats set out on a journey, traversing the ruins of what was once a huge structure, jumping from concrete block to giant pipe, lowering railings and burrowing in cat-like fashion. It’s only when you’re following your three siblings down a large pipe that a cutscene occurs and Ginger (as I call him) scrabbles, slides, and then falls far, far down. It’s really traumatic! G/O Media may receive a commission Waking up inside what looks like a sewer pipe, Ginger injures himself, walking with yet another extremely noticeable limp, before falling down and resting some more. At this point your kitten feels so vulnerable, so fragile and as a player it is imperative that you do everything you can to keep the little guy safe. This is clearly set in some sort of future, post-human by the looks of things, with the rusted remains of robots lining your path. Then, at a glance at the beginning, you see some rather unpleasant pink creatures that feel like they would be more at home on Inside. However, they run away so you can continue your kitty, jumping and running, looking for safety and as the player, desperately wondering how to reunite the little one with its family. Then you find the flying robot. Now, that’s not as dumb as it sounds, given that as a cat in a world seemingly inhabited only by AI lifeforms, you’d otherwise have a hard time communicating. B-12, your robot companion, appears to be able to talk to cats and robots alike, and also has the amazing ability to “digitize” physical objects and then re-materialize them when needed. Well, yes, it’s an inventory speaker. Stray, at this point, becomes a game about a cat in an underground robot city, helping the locals with their menial tasks. And, even here, I’m cool. You’re still—albeit now wearing a giant robo saddle—a cat, and while I’ve yet to meet the cat that would willingly help anyone do anything, it’s still fun to play. Your role is never more than finding third-person platforming routes to a destination, and jumping around the city’s vast areas gives you a lot of freedom. Even the ability to roleplay as a cat, ie ignore your tasks and just find cool places to sleep. It starts to strain credulity here around the one hour mark of its five or six hour run, as you optionally collect sheet music for a robot to play on a guitar and search for “memories” for your amnesiac robot. looking at floating pixel patterns and trying to find enough energy drink cans to buy items from a shop… Yeah, yeah, I know, it’s already devolved into game-play-game nonsense, but like I say, you do it all like a kitten . After this long stretch, just over halfway through, I’d say Stray pretty much abandons all notions of being a cat-sim and just descends into every other third-person action game. Screenshot: BlueTwelve Studio / Kotaku You help a robot find the equipment it needs to complete a weapon that can take on the Zurks. These are the nonsensical names that look like alien blobs that have apparently mutated into existence at some point since the death of humanity. The further you go, the more fleshy tissue you see dancing through tunnels and up the sides of buildings, taking this cute cat-me-do into a realm of visceral horror motifs that feels so strangely out of place. These grow eggs, the eggs spawn Zurk, and you have to kill them with a purple light. It’s L1 to fire the beam of light, emitted by the B-12 hovering over your cat’s body, so there’s really no pretense that you’re controlling anything other than the machine. And you’re zapping what might as well be aliens. In gray corridors. Can you see the theme? Later, it continues to run away from the enemy drones, which cast a net of blue light in front of them. Cross in and it’s green, then if you stay too long it’s red and they start shooting bullets at you. Bullets, fired from floating drones, into gray ruins… I am dumbfounded by this. How did a game that was so great at letting us play kitty-kitty as well as with such accurate and delightful observations of cat behavior end up in this place? It’s certainly not because he wanted something. Screenshot: BlueTwelve Studio / Kotaku I would have been happy if it had continued as it started for five or six hours. Just being a cat, exploring an abandoned city, looking for paths through the ruins. Maybe I should find a drink here and there, and maybe – as the player – I could weave something of the history of the place into the cat’s apparent indifference. Heck, if I desperately needed to get into sci-fi, maybe I’d stumble upon surviving computers and traps, which I had to avoid in a cat-like fashion. Honestly, I would have given up on bots altogether, as their real role is to present recovery missions. But even if he kept them, he didn’t have to slide that far down the slippery slope to gametown. I won’t even go into how much I hated the ending. That may be for another day. Let’s just say my son is still furious about how awful it was two days later. It really included how much the game had left the great place it started, and if you’ve completed the game, you’ll know exactly what I mean. Stray could have been just magical from start to finish. Instead, it’s magical at first and then slowly crumbles into the gray robotic muck of Most Other Games. At first, I was role-playing! Meowing at locked doors, deliberately going in the wrong direction to explore nooks and crannies, haughtily ignoring a pressing task of finding a place to sleep. By the end I had almost completely forgotten I was a cat, and I might as well have been a spaceship for all the difference it made. And that sucks.
