Stray is firmly in the style over substance camp: with its gorgeously detailed city and dreamy soundscape, it unfortunately presents some noticeable limitations in the gameplay department.
The Good:
Beautiful world and art direction - Good musical score - Some brief sections of gameplay offer some thrills - Occasionally amusing feline shenanigans
The Bad:
Restrictive movement defeats the purpose of the cat gimmick - Game mechanics are introduced and dropped before you can make heads or tails of them - Occasionally confusing paths to your goals - Simplistic puzzles, often solving themselves - Pointless secondary objectives
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When it was announced back in 2020, Stray turned quite a few heads on account of its quality presentation, cute fuzzy protagonist and the fact that there really aren't that many games where you control an animal that's not anthropomorphic in some way or another. It was a fresh concept set in an appealing cyberpunk world and it garnered some well earn attention. So how does Stray fare when it comes to making the player feel like a kitty cat? Unfortunately, not particularly well.
For one thing, the cat's mobility is severely limited. Forget about being able to jump around to to your heart's content, engaging in thrilling parkour or causing havoc in a freestyle manner. While the game offers a satisfying sprint motion, it doesn't feature a dedicated jump button, in fact it only allows you to contextually leap to very specific ledges, which usually constitute the only possible way to reach a certain spot. There is no fail state for the climbing either, as it's impossible to fall or take any kind of misstep, such is the guided nature of the climbing. Heck, you can't even drop a few feet on your own terms, anchored to your present perch as you are: you will need to look down and find the next intended platform to be allowed to descend.
The result is that moving around feels at times constrictive, almost oppressive, especially in the more open areas, as many boxes, signs and pipes that look like they could be jumped on are entirely uninteractive, leading to a frustrating hunt for the one path that allows you up a building. Conversely, in more linear sections it is completely mindless, as you can pretty much just mash the X button to hop from ledge to ledge without any though or care, since there is only ever one path to success and no possibility for failure. If you've played games like Uncharted 4 or Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, you have an idea of just how automatic it can feel.
So the cat's experience leaves a lot to be desired (I guess there is a dedicated meow button) but what about the rest of the game mechanics? sadly they don't fare much better, only this time because of quantity rather than quality. The game has a tendency to introduce features that are only explored over the span of one or two brief chapters and then dropped abruptly, chiefly among them the ravenous rodents that infest the underbelly of the city, which are established as a threat with several high octane chase sequences, then drop out of the second half of the game, as does the UV lamp you are eventually given, which is used as a weapon to combat the creatures for what feels like a handful of minutes before it's taken away from you, never to return.
Similarly, an interesting mechanic hinted at early on, which makes electrical appliances react to the cat's meows, is completely discarded after the tutorial area, as is the stealth element, which only comes into play at the very end of the game for a few rooms worth of sneaking around the cone of vision of drones, and then never really moves past that. There are two (count them) rooms in which you need to show a little bit of ingenuity by meowing in order to lure and trap drones inside a cell, but even that is introduced and swiftly forgotten. All of these mechanics end up feeling like stubs more than fully fleshed out gameplay elements, never really gelling together, as one tends to replace another in the serrated pace of the game (3 to 5 hours depending on getting stuck during exploration).
These are all very simple puzzles, as are the rest of the ones present in the game: it's all about figuring out some very self-evident chain of events, like disturbing a couple of workers moving paint buckets so they can sully the doorstep of a shopkeeper and allow the cat to slip in during the commotion, or waking up a drunk mover so the cat can hide in a box and be smuggled inside a building. Other times you will notice how the game suffers from a bad case of "finding the key before the door", that is discovering the solution to a puzzle before the problem even presents itself. You will need to find a new set of clothes for a repairman before he agrees to fix an item for you, but odds are you will have already found and delivered the clothes before the request is even made. Another time I have inserted a tape into a boombox, which distracted a storekeeper with no apparent purpose, which became apparent later when I was tasked with stealing something from his store. Sequence breaking the puzzles in this manner is extremely common, making their solutions feel unrewarding as a result.
Similarly unrewarding are the side objectives, which serve no purpose whatsoever aside from achievements and cosmetic badges you can apply to your cat's harness: you might toil for hours to find all the music sheets for a street musician, only to be repaid with a lame cosmetic and a handful of achievement points for your gamerscore. Depending on personal taste that can be enough, but it really speaks volumes about the state of modern gaming, when complex sidequests yield no gameplay-impacting rewards at all. You will be excused for choosing to skip them altogether going forward, knowing there is no worthwile payoff at the end of your efforts. An upgrade system for your gear and abilities would have gone a long way towards making the side content more meaningful, but it wasn't so.
In conclusion, Stray is an ok game, featuring a gorgeous world reminiscent of Final Fantasy VII mixed with Portal, and a few amusing moments of very cat-like shenanigans, like dropping paint buckets on people or ruining someone's board game session by leaping on the table. Unfortunately the gameplay isn't really refined enough to make it particularly compelling.
The Good:
Beautiful world and art direction - Good musical score - Some brief sections of gameplay offer some thrills - Occasionally amusing feline shenanigans
The Bad:
Restrictive movement defeats the purpose of the cat gimmick - Game mechanics are introduced and dropped before you can make heads or tails of them - Occasionally confusing paths to your goals - Simplistic puzzles, often solving themselves - Pointless secondary objectives
-----------------
When it was announced back in 2020, Stray turned quite a few heads on account of its quality presentation, cute fuzzy protagonist and the fact that there really aren't that many games where you control an animal that's not anthropomorphic in some way or another. It was a fresh concept set in an appealing cyberpunk world and it garnered some well earn attention. So how does Stray fare when it comes to making the player feel like a kitty cat? Unfortunately, not particularly well.
For one thing, the cat's mobility is severely limited. Forget about being able to jump around to to your heart's content, engaging in thrilling parkour or causing havoc in a freestyle manner. While the game offers a satisfying sprint motion, it doesn't feature a dedicated jump button, in fact it only allows you to contextually leap to very specific ledges, which usually constitute the only possible way to reach a certain spot. There is no fail state for the climbing either, as it's impossible to fall or take any kind of misstep, such is the guided nature of the climbing. Heck, you can't even drop a few feet on your own terms, anchored to your present perch as you are: you will need to look down and find the next intended platform to be allowed to descend.
The result is that moving around feels at times constrictive, almost oppressive, especially in the more open areas, as many boxes, signs and pipes that look like they could be jumped on are entirely uninteractive, leading to a frustrating hunt for the one path that allows you up a building. Conversely, in more linear sections it is completely mindless, as you can pretty much just mash the X button to hop from ledge to ledge without any though or care, since there is only ever one path to success and no possibility for failure. If you've played games like Uncharted 4 or Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, you have an idea of just how automatic it can feel.
So the cat's experience leaves a lot to be desired (I guess there is a dedicated meow button) but what about the rest of the game mechanics? sadly they don't fare much better, only this time because of quantity rather than quality. The game has a tendency to introduce features that are only explored over the span of one or two brief chapters and then dropped abruptly, chiefly among them the ravenous rodents that infest the underbelly of the city, which are established as a threat with several high octane chase sequences, then drop out of the second half of the game, as does the UV lamp you are eventually given, which is used as a weapon to combat the creatures for what feels like a handful of minutes before it's taken away from you, never to return.
Similarly, an interesting mechanic hinted at early on, which makes electrical appliances react to the cat's meows, is completely discarded after the tutorial area, as is the stealth element, which only comes into play at the very end of the game for a few rooms worth of sneaking around the cone of vision of drones, and then never really moves past that. There are two (count them) rooms in which you need to show a little bit of ingenuity by meowing in order to lure and trap drones inside a cell, but even that is introduced and swiftly forgotten. All of these mechanics end up feeling like stubs more than fully fleshed out gameplay elements, never really gelling together, as one tends to replace another in the serrated pace of the game (3 to 5 hours depending on getting stuck during exploration).
These are all very simple puzzles, as are the rest of the ones present in the game: it's all about figuring out some very self-evident chain of events, like disturbing a couple of workers moving paint buckets so they can sully the doorstep of a shopkeeper and allow the cat to slip in during the commotion, or waking up a drunk mover so the cat can hide in a box and be smuggled inside a building. Other times you will notice how the game suffers from a bad case of "finding the key before the door", that is discovering the solution to a puzzle before the problem even presents itself. You will need to find a new set of clothes for a repairman before he agrees to fix an item for you, but odds are you will have already found and delivered the clothes before the request is even made. Another time I have inserted a tape into a boombox, which distracted a storekeeper with no apparent purpose, which became apparent later when I was tasked with stealing something from his store. Sequence breaking the puzzles in this manner is extremely common, making their solutions feel unrewarding as a result.
Similarly unrewarding are the side objectives, which serve no purpose whatsoever aside from achievements and cosmetic badges you can apply to your cat's harness: you might toil for hours to find all the music sheets for a street musician, only to be repaid with a lame cosmetic and a handful of achievement points for your gamerscore. Depending on personal taste that can be enough, but it really speaks volumes about the state of modern gaming, when complex sidequests yield no gameplay-impacting rewards at all. You will be excused for choosing to skip them altogether going forward, knowing there is no worthwile payoff at the end of your efforts. An upgrade system for your gear and abilities would have gone a long way towards making the side content more meaningful, but it wasn't so.
In conclusion, Stray is an ok game, featuring a gorgeous world reminiscent of Final Fantasy VII mixed with Portal, and a few amusing moments of very cat-like shenanigans, like dropping paint buckets on people or ruining someone's board game session by leaping on the table. Unfortunately the gameplay isn't really refined enough to make it particularly compelling.