“Stray,” a new video game for Sony’s SONY, +3.42% PlayStation and Microsoft MSFT, +2.08% Windows, lets players explore an underground, cyberpunk city as a ginger tabby trying to return to his family of. The $29.99 third-person adventure and puzzle platformer — from French development studio BlueTwelve and published by Annapurna Interactive — has generated plenty of hype since it was first shown off during the 2020 PS5 reveal event. (A (newest 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. Here are some mild spoilers: The gist of the game is that you play a lost, stray cat who wanders through an underground city populated 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 called B12 (who can talk to humanoid robots about your cat character), 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 also avoiding the hungry monsters who want to eat this cute kitten almost as much as the players. “Stray” was trending on Twitter both Monday and Tuesday at the game’s release, with more than 363,000 tweets by late Tuesday afternoon. And perhaps the most adorable early trend involved players posting videos of their own cats being misled by the unnamed protagonist on foot. Game developers BlueTwelve Studio were not immediately available for comment. But they revealed in a post on the PlayStation blog that they made sure to make the strays at the center of the game look and feel as much like real cats as possible. (Well, aside from showing cat buttholes, obviously.) And the finished product seems to resonate with real-life cats and their humans, alike.
Some dogs got into it, too. PlayStation’s blog post also introduced the three cats that inspired the game’s flagship feline. They include an orange tabby named Murtaugh, a former stray himself, who was found under a car in Montpellier, France. He now lives with the co-owners of BlueTwelve Studio. And a hairless Sphinx named Oscar was the muse of the lead cat animator — who reportedly animates the cats by hand, not in a motion-capture suit — to capture the fine details of a feline’s movements as it runs, jumps, scratches, “It’s humming. malice’ and rises. Both cats were regular visitors inside 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.

The real-life rescue cat Murtaugh inspired “Stray’s” feline lead.

        BlueTwelve Studio

Early reviews of the game were largely positive – The Washington Post called it a “breast meow” and The Verge called it “one of the best games of the year so far”. But some critics have also said that the game doesn’t always “hit its feet,” so to speak, and its charm can wear off quickly. However, much of the highest praise has gone to how well the developers captured the feeling of being a cat – from the way in-game strays stretch when they stand up, rub against each other, scratch trees or nonchalantly knock over bottles as they pass, to the fact that there is a “dedicated meow button”. That’s probably why “Stray” has been like catnip to gamers sharing it 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 number of YouTube videos aimed at cats (aka “cat TV”), featuring footage of birds and squirrels to keep felines occupied while they’re home alone. Maybe now cat owners can also skip the “Stray” loading screen or game opening tutorial running for their fur babies too.