Stray’s strengths are hidden behind tangible and familiar game mechanics and the language used to describe them. I think it’s easy to talk about Stray’s tangible details and lose track of its core appeal. Depending on how its trappings prime you or its strengths resonate with you, I would not bat an eye at giving this game a perfect score or barely passing marks.
I’m sincerely torn on Stray’s mix of gameplay elements vs. appeal of cat-ness. Because there are objectives and collectibles and side quests, and all of them have bugger-all to do with being a cat. The action scenes in particular reek of game developer insecurity, a lack of confidence that meowing and napping are enough to carry a game experience.
While I was having fun playing Stray, initially I was also mocking it. Based on the trailer, I got what I expected. I could walk, I could jump, I could meow. Familiarity wrongly made side quests and chase scenes feel like the only “gameplay” that mattered. That disconnect was only a vague intuition until I watched a couple of my friends play the game.
From the moment Friend 1 took control, my brain thought, “that’s a different cat.”
In real life, Friend 1 had an outdoor cat, a scrapper. When he picked up the controller, his Stray cat was running all the time. He knocked things over by accident. His cat made hasty jumps and changed its mind. He meowed every time he wasn’t sure where to go next. He meowed while he was waiting for doors to open. He meowed while NPCs were taking forever to advance the game.
When Friend 2 took control, it was a completely different, third cat.
Friend 2 had never owned a cat. When given control, his Stray cat behaved like an idea of a cat. He deliberately knocked over every object from every surface. He went back to push over bottles he missed. He scratched at every scratch spot. He ran along every throughway. He spammed the meow button whenever he got frustrated.
These observations retroactively caused me to recognize that, unnoticed by myself at the time, the primary engagement of how I’d played the game had been an expression of myself as a cat. My expression of my Stray cat had been so natural and unthinking that I had missed that I was role-playing.
In real life, I had a cat for 19 years. She had a personality that was deliberate and discerning. She was aloof. She did not run, she did not meow. She avoided disturbing her environment as much as possible. As such, when I was given control over a cat in this game, I behaved like my cat. I never ran, except when the game forced me to. The idea of pressing the run button didn’t cross my mind - it didn’t seem the cat-like thing to do. I avoided knocking things over, because making a mess made it harder to find collectibles. I stopped meowing after I realized no one would react to it.
How else can I describe these observations besides immediate, intuitive, invisible role-playing? There was no decision making. When given the means of expression, we each had a small part of ourselves with instructions of How to Cat that automatically took over. Instructions so obvious and ingrained that each of us only noticed when watching another person play as a different cat. Most importantly, every behavior and game action that made our Stray cats distinct had close to zero “relevance” to playing the game “correctly.”
It is odd to realize you can beat this game doing very few cat-like things. Napping, rubbing against the legs of robots, clawing at carpets - all unnecessary and pointless. Yet there are achievements for all three. Which is a clue that, if everything you can do is “pointless”, perhaps the understanding of “the point” is flawed.
Perhaps the pretense of some other objective is necessary for people to let their guard down, for the role-playing to take over organically.
I can see why people love this game. Is it because you get to play as a cat, 10/10? I know that’s often used as a flippant, disparaging remark, but this game has resonated with too many people for me to dismiss that sentiment as without insight.
I loved my cat. I mourned her passing. I moved on. But playing this game, I learned something about myself. That a small ghost of my cat’s memory has been incorporated into how my brain works, if I were ever a cat. Because while I know these are behaviors she had, she didn’t play this game. I did. I finished it without thinking about her. She has, quite literally, become a part of me that has never had an outlet of expression before. That’s a connection that goes beyond sentiment to statement of fact. If someone connected with an animal dear to them in a new, novel, perhaps profound way, what kind of sociopath would I be not to have empathy for that?
I would love for the games industry to learn the right lessons from Stray. I worry those lessons will not be communicated respectably because the language of video game discussion is centered on violence and corporate bloat. I hate that there are alien enemies. I hate the robot buddy espousing dialog and lore for a story that makes no sense because I am a cat. But even writing to complain about them shifts the conversation into familiar territory that veers away from what made Stray a contender for Game of the Year, 2022.
Before even leaving the title screen, every person I have shared this game with has asked, “can you choose the color of your cat?” Because my friends were tapping into the appeal of this game, what they wanted this game to be, much faster than I. Traditional games experiences had conditioned me to expect a jump button. My friends were here to be a cat.
And sometimes, being a cat means pressing the nap button, with the only tension being deciding when to wake up.
I’m sincerely torn on Stray’s mix of gameplay elements vs. appeal of cat-ness. Because there are objectives and collectibles and side quests, and all of them have bugger-all to do with being a cat. The action scenes in particular reek of game developer insecurity, a lack of confidence that meowing and napping are enough to carry a game experience.
While I was having fun playing Stray, initially I was also mocking it. Based on the trailer, I got what I expected. I could walk, I could jump, I could meow. Familiarity wrongly made side quests and chase scenes feel like the only “gameplay” that mattered. That disconnect was only a vague intuition until I watched a couple of my friends play the game.
From the moment Friend 1 took control, my brain thought, “that’s a different cat.”
In real life, Friend 1 had an outdoor cat, a scrapper. When he picked up the controller, his Stray cat was running all the time. He knocked things over by accident. His cat made hasty jumps and changed its mind. He meowed every time he wasn’t sure where to go next. He meowed while he was waiting for doors to open. He meowed while NPCs were taking forever to advance the game.
When Friend 2 took control, it was a completely different, third cat.
Friend 2 had never owned a cat. When given control, his Stray cat behaved like an idea of a cat. He deliberately knocked over every object from every surface. He went back to push over bottles he missed. He scratched at every scratch spot. He ran along every throughway. He spammed the meow button whenever he got frustrated.
These observations retroactively caused me to recognize that, unnoticed by myself at the time, the primary engagement of how I’d played the game had been an expression of myself as a cat. My expression of my Stray cat had been so natural and unthinking that I had missed that I was role-playing.
In real life, I had a cat for 19 years. She had a personality that was deliberate and discerning. She was aloof. She did not run, she did not meow. She avoided disturbing her environment as much as possible. As such, when I was given control over a cat in this game, I behaved like my cat. I never ran, except when the game forced me to. The idea of pressing the run button didn’t cross my mind - it didn’t seem the cat-like thing to do. I avoided knocking things over, because making a mess made it harder to find collectibles. I stopped meowing after I realized no one would react to it.
How else can I describe these observations besides immediate, intuitive, invisible role-playing? There was no decision making. When given the means of expression, we each had a small part of ourselves with instructions of How to Cat that automatically took over. Instructions so obvious and ingrained that each of us only noticed when watching another person play as a different cat. Most importantly, every behavior and game action that made our Stray cats distinct had close to zero “relevance” to playing the game “correctly.”
It is odd to realize you can beat this game doing very few cat-like things. Napping, rubbing against the legs of robots, clawing at carpets - all unnecessary and pointless. Yet there are achievements for all three. Which is a clue that, if everything you can do is “pointless”, perhaps the understanding of “the point” is flawed.
Perhaps the pretense of some other objective is necessary for people to let their guard down, for the role-playing to take over organically.
I can see why people love this game. Is it because you get to play as a cat, 10/10? I know that’s often used as a flippant, disparaging remark, but this game has resonated with too many people for me to dismiss that sentiment as without insight.
I loved my cat. I mourned her passing. I moved on. But playing this game, I learned something about myself. That a small ghost of my cat’s memory has been incorporated into how my brain works, if I were ever a cat. Because while I know these are behaviors she had, she didn’t play this game. I did. I finished it without thinking about her. She has, quite literally, become a part of me that has never had an outlet of expression before. That’s a connection that goes beyond sentiment to statement of fact. If someone connected with an animal dear to them in a new, novel, perhaps profound way, what kind of sociopath would I be not to have empathy for that?
I would love for the games industry to learn the right lessons from Stray. I worry those lessons will not be communicated respectably because the language of video game discussion is centered on violence and corporate bloat. I hate that there are alien enemies. I hate the robot buddy espousing dialog and lore for a story that makes no sense because I am a cat. But even writing to complain about them shifts the conversation into familiar territory that veers away from what made Stray a contender for Game of the Year, 2022.
Before even leaving the title screen, every person I have shared this game with has asked, “can you choose the color of your cat?” Because my friends were tapping into the appeal of this game, what they wanted this game to be, much faster than I. Traditional games experiences had conditioned me to expect a jump button. My friends were here to be a cat.
And sometimes, being a cat means pressing the nap button, with the only tension being deciding when to wake up.
Reviewed on Dec 16, 2022
xeivious
1 year ago