Stray is a great example of how a change in perspective can bring a familiar fantasy setting to life. Post-apocalyptic narratives have been done to death lately, but this one is interesting because we experience it from such an unusual perspective. Accompanied by a drone, which acts as a translator between the robots, the cat and the player, we pass through a city cut off from the world, trying to get to the outside, where we belong. Stray sounds like a shallow meme – it’s the cyberpunk cat game! – but the setting and the story have substance, and in the end I honestly found it quite moving. Perhaps the least credible aspect of the whole setup is that a cat would actually be that useful. I had little trouble with any of Stray’s puzzles or challenges, but that may be because I grew up with a mix of 3D platformers and point-and-click adventures in the 1990s, and Stray is a mix of those two genres. You find paths to buildings, jump over gaps, and carefully sneak past danger, and you also pick up keys, chat (via the drone) with robots, and figure out uses for trinkets you come across. You can linger and take your time exploring, and I wish I had done more of that – there aren’t too many secret things to find in each area, but what’s worth it is unlocking fascinating information about what happened in that long- abandoned place. Stray is apparently made by cat people. Of course he has. The cat is superbly lifelike, with its little twitchy ears, its meows and its purrs (which vibrate charmingly through the controller), the way it goes from soft pout to leisurely run to run. Near the beginning of the game he dons a leash and spends the first few minutes flirting in a state of indignant confusion that will be familiar to anyone who has tried unsuccessfully to put a kitten in a Halloween costume. My eternal pursuit while playing Stray was to find cozy little places to curl up for a snooze. such spots are everywhere, on pillows, in corners, on shelves, in the belly of a prone robot. There’s no point in this, as the game doesn’t specifically reward you for it. It doesn’t reward you for digging your claws into every tempting piece of fabric you see, nor for purposefully pulling things off the shelves with a little crawler foot, but I did that too. I just enjoyed being a cat. The bots are also unexpected features, with their emoji on-screen faces and cool animations. This is an amazing game, whether viewed from the ground or from the rooftops – I won’t spoil the cat’s journey, but the developer brings plenty of innovation and some impressively creepy moments from this closed city in the seven hours it takes to play. It’s certainly far from twee, with the possible exception of the lifting buckets you can drop from rooftops, legs and ears that all come out of the top – and these are so cute they’re instantly forgivable. We may literally control the cat in Stray, but figuratively, there’s always a little distance between us and the creature. As players, we eagerly gather information from the non-humans we meet and the places we go, trying to figure out what to do next – but the cat is just doing its thing, it’s curious, it’s trying to survive. By placing this magnetic yet unknown creature of nature in a tightly controlled, man-made sci-fi dystopia, Stray highlights something every cat already knows: you can never really tame a cat. There is always something a little wild about them, and they bring that wildness wherever they go.
