where do i start You press O to meow. You hit L and R to scrape trees (and furniture). You purr from the corners and lie in the corners. Interludes see you waltzing to a keyboard, dancing to pianos and terrorizing board games. And while Stray’s cat is just a ginger tabby, not as long or genetically modified or struggling to breathe as the internet’s most famous cats, he will still, like Untitled Goose Game’s goose before him, provide ample food for memes. Thanks to a partnership with Travel Cat, there’s even a collection of Stray-themed harnesses and backpacks that can carry “25 pounds of cat in its sturdy, well-ventilated chassis.” There’s been a lot of talk about the cat, and fair enough, it’s the star of the show here. But I will focus on something else: namely, the seemingly limitless influence of the now-defunct Walled City of Kowloon. Stray takes place after the apocalypse. The humans are gone, but the cats are proving as resilient as cockroaches. (Jonathan Franzen teared up.) The game begins with four fur balls dodging the rain in a vine-wrapped concrete structure. On your daily walk through the ruins of industrial civilization, you slide down a crevasse, in the dark, landing hard in a moldy sewer. After touring a lab, you discover a flying drone called B12. This drone will act as the Navi to your mute Link, living in a backpack much like the one I just mentioned, which allows you—er, the cat—to perform tasks that require opposable thumbs—like using lenses and keyboards— and a concept of language—such as the translation of Robot into American English. The scene is eerily familiar. In 1993, William Gibson visited Singapore and deplored the dystopia he found there. As he decompressed on the flight home, he revealed a forlorn hope: to take a second look at an ongoing obsession “before the future comes to tear it down.” That obsession was the Walled City of Kowloon. He wrote: “Dream hive. Those mismatched, uncalculated windows. How they seemed to absorb all the frantic activity of Kai Tak Airport, sucking energy like a black hole. I was ready for something like that.” The Walled City, when it still stood, loomed on the edge of Kowloon City, which was then part of British Hong Kong. Controlled by China as a de jure enclave, it became a political pinball machine: Hong Kong’s British rulers hated it. China would not destroy it. They were run by five triad gangs, James Crawford explains in his article for Atlas Obscura. There was “no taxation, no business regulation, no health or planning system, no police presence. People could come to Kowloon and, in official terms, disappear.’ Remarkable productivity—residents produced enough fishballs to supply Hong Kong’s wealthy upper classes—combined with gambling, prostitution and drugs. Even rats, Crawford writes, were crippled by heroin addiction.
