From the outside looking in, art school seems like a weird experience. My partner dedicated several years to developing their degree and I’d get to hear first-hand details of just the bizarre petty problems it would entail. High school level cattiness, teachers who would see students as competition instead of talented individuals, cliques between different departments, so on and so forth. But out of all of it, there was one observation from my partner that really stuck with me.

“A lot of great artists don’t know how to write and a lot of great writers don’t know how to use art.”

Stray’s art direction might have, genuinely, one of the highest bars to clear I’ve ever seen. This is the new peak for me. Every single aspect of this game is firing on all cylinders. The world is vibrantly sharp in its beauty and structure. Each street corner, every nook, every room, every chair, everything feels personal and designed for that specific space. It's a game about the subtle beauty of an urban environment, about lived-in spaces and how people build their homes around themselves. You can easily beat this game in under two hours if you’re racing through, but that would be a disservice to the utter care and craft that went into building this world. Most playtimes last five hours and mine lasted longer just for soaking in all the visuals. I’ve never been someone who stopped to take pictures of impressive game visuals, but took numerous opportunities to take screenshots while playing this game. Every AAA game after this is gonna have to do a LOT of legwork to make me half as impressed with its visuals as I am with this one cat game.

The famous cat itself is of course the star of the show. The animation work done to nail the gamefeel of this cat is beyond compare. The Stray feels exactly as it should, fluid and seamless. The gameplay is perfectly designed around being a cat. I found myself genuinely surprised at a few points in the game because my expectations as a long-time gaming person clashed with the rules of being a cat. A single fence in your way? Games have trained me to think of that as an impenetrable barrier. I return to a quest giver to find the police blockade set-up? I’m not supposed to go in there anymore, the cops will see me. But that’s silly. A cat just finds a hole or climbs up a fence. The police won’t notice a cat passing them by. The real obstacles now are just doors or shelves that are a little too high off the ground. I had to retrain my brain over what was and wasn’t possible to accomplish in the gameworld.

People have sort of turned on accounts like Can I Pet the Dog for being a little too twee, and I do understand why. But I think people misinterpret the purpose of accounts like that. While there’s certainly a marketable wholesomeness to wanting to pet a digital line of code in a video game, the real core of Can I Pet the Dog is about encouraging more methods of interaction. Allowing players to personally interact in the game world in ways that make that world seem more real. It's the Who Framed Roger Rabbit animators making their job harder by making Roger bump into real world items constantly. It's Shovel Knight adding a useless crouch button that can’t dodge anything, just for the sake of giving players that option. The useless button or the useless interaction is one of the most subtle but beautiful ways to add a special polish to your game.

Stray is a master of this thesis. The game provides hundreds and hundreds of ways for the player to interact like this. Nuzzling random robots. Little cat nap locations that just pan over to the gorgeous cityscape. Knocking over boxes and paint cans. Places to claw at carpets. The dedicated meow button. The way the Stray lies on the ground or walks around in annoyance when someone puts an outfit on it. Standing in the middle of the road can lead to a robot completely tripping over you and collapsing into the pavement. All these details and nuances add so much life and personality to the world. Stuff like Catlateral Damage falls apart because it features one stiff movement as the main centerpiece of the entire game. It only offers one level of interaction across three hours of gametime. Stray offers so much variability in ways that speaks to something about the world and its protagonist.

It's in the writing itself that the game sort of wobbles. Don’t get me wrong, putting a cat in a cyberpunk landscape is truly ingenious. If it was just a cat game wandering through city streets, I think it’d be too lacking in personality to really shine. If it was just a game about a robot society living underground, I think it’d vanish into the forgotten sea of other simply alright sci-fi games. Combining them together allows unique gameplay elements and makes these ideas feel fresh.

But the reason it needs to be combined together is that the robot society element would likely be very dull when left on its own. The set-up of the robot culture is initially interesting. The robots have built their own language, their own history, their own religion. They’re certainly aware of humans, but only in a mythical sense. They’ve mimicked their creators to an extent, before passing down that mimicry through the ages and getting naturally distorted through the times.

Yet it's hard not to feel a little disappointed after a while that mimicry is sort of all that society is. The robots have just recreated the same social structure, same concepts of gender, the same jobs and hierarchies. Old robots complain about “kids today and their music,” while I’m trying to understand how kid robots even exist. When you have tiny robots repeating phrases like “That’s what I want to be when I grow up!” without detailing how growth and age works for robots, it's hard not to get a little confused. Robots get drunk like humans, have developed digestive systems within their systems… I’m not trying to Cinema Sins whine about something being illogical. I was just hoping that a game this creative could demonstrate a culture more distinct than just being Metal Humans.

The character work itself also runs into this problem. There’s occasional aspects of sincere depth. The cat’s companion can visit different locations and the game and speak emotionally about their surroundings. Reminisce about forgotten drinks and lonely nights and how those moments stayed with them hundreds of years later. But several character arcs can pass by so quickly it's a little jarring. Grumpy drinker Seamus acts as a disgruntled, bitter character for his early appearances. Yet it only takes giving him one journal from his father to make him completely 180 into someone with hope and optimism. It was a sweet storyline, but given the subsequent fetch quest you get sent on, it would also be easy to give Seamus some more time. Have your companion say “we should fix Seamus’ thing while he copes with this extremely personal item we gave him” and then have him express his change in demeanor after he’s had some off-screen time to process. Breathing room, you know? Another character decides to swerve to betrayal in the late game. But that character has had so little presence so far, I barely recognized who he was. He just didn’t stick out.

Even beyond that, the way the robots react to the Stray is hard to quite pin down. They all view the cat as an intelligent being and assume it’s just a particularly tiny, fuzzy robot. They try to have intelligent conversations with it, with your companion B-12 translating for the audience’s benefit. But they also don’t mind what they think is a robot stranger nuzzling up to them or lying on their chest. It's cute and I love those moments! But it gives you pause sometimes.

It's particularly weird with the character of B-12. B-12 knows what a cat is and shares a lot of emotional dialogue with the Stray. But I kind of wish B-12 talked to the Stray like a cat owner. Call the cat your stinky baby. Giving speeches about friendship and things like “I can’t believe you came to rescue me!” just feels… I’m not sure what I’m asking for. The game wants to convey its story but I think it created a weird necessary suspension of disbelief where the cat has to be both a cat and an intelligent silent protagonist that takes in character monologues. Its just a weird needle to thread and I think it makes the character work harder to pull off.

I think maybe the game could have experimented with no dialogue at all. Some of the game’s best segments are when there’s no translator and the story needs to be conveyed through visuals alone. And the visuals are so striking that the team is absolutely capable of doing so. Player goals are perfectly directed through excellent lighting choices and level design. Visuals alone can carry this game. Drop the players fully into the life of a cat. No words, no dialogue, just pure cat living.

Its hard to be disappointed with this one though. I might take another run at this game to get the last few achievements, just because I adored the world so much. Its a real marvel and easily high in the running for GOTY 2022.

When you’re a young kid in the 00s who hasn’t quite figured out that you’re trans yet, there’s certain pieces of media you fixate on. Things that give you Feelings that you don’t fully understand or know how to explain. This is particularly weird with media that is created by people that are absolutely not trying to create a trans message and would probably spit on in your face if you implied they were. Polyjuice potions in Harry Potter, the entirety of Ranma, and, of course, the "Boy Who Would Be Queen" episode of Fairly OddParents.

There's a bizarre nature to these kinds of projects. The creators are so single minded in their idea of how things are "supposed" to be and so consistent in using things they consider "wrong" as a cheap gag, it kind of swerves back around to give some kids (or least me) some young gender euphoria. A lot of FOP falls under this umbrella, but The Boy Who Would Be Queen episode toys with some interesting attempts at examining the idea of gender. Timmy is magically transformed to become "Timantha" to understand his crush, and discovers how his tastes haven't really changed as a girl. He still likes soap operas and comics, but now he's supposed to be ashamed of the latter rather than the former. He discovers his crush falls into the same problem. Trixie likes comics and video games but feels the pressure of society forcing her to fill the traditional gender roles. The prison of gender hurts all parties involved. What's particularly easy to read as queer in the episode is how both Timmy and Trixie are presenting themselves. Timmy's obviously dressed as Timantha, but Trixie is also trying to pass as a boy. In these disguises, these two can express genuine, vulnerable feelings to each other that they will never express in the rest of the show. Trixie tells Timantha, a girl she's known for just a few hours, like a normal straight girl would, "If only you were a boy, then I'd date you for sure." The gag is obviously supposed to be that Timmy's crush is still out of reach, but its so on the nose its hard not to read into it. To a young 10 year old who was just lectured and ostracized for agreeing with the girls that "girls are better than boys", this episode sent a chill up my spine. And I wasn't the only one. If you dive into fanfiction communities, you'll find more than a few stories that center around Timmy choosing to permanently stay as Timantha so that Trixie can have a real "friend."

Much of Breakin' Da Rules rehashes various plots from the early FOP canon. Timmy becomes a dog. Timmy becomes microscopic. Timmy fights aliens. Timmy and friends trapped in a video game. And, of course, Timmy becomes Timantha.

There was a time in my life where I would focus in on that ten minute segment where you're Timantha, trying to ignore the "could this GET any more silly?" quips. Begging for something more, I would spin elaborate narratives in my mind where this segment could go on forever. I never finished the game proper, that segment was all I needed.

Now I'm an adult and I can do two things:

1. Mod the game to add the Timantha face onto Timmy full time, which I sat down and learned how to do.

2. Understand how deeply bad this game is past that ten minute segment.

There's certainly ambition here. When you crack into a game's files, you get a greater understanding of just how much work went into the game. There's dozens of different models that Timmy plays as throughout the game. Timantha, Dog Timmy, Superhero Timmy, Robin Hood Timmy, Greek Toga Timmy, and so on and so forth. Modding the game required me to manually change the eyes of every single one of these models. The levels themselves clearly built a lot of assets. Each level has a different gimmick, sometimes multiple gimmicks. The time travel level required a bunch of different textures and assets built for all three of the time periods you travel to. I can certainly respect how much effort went into that.

But its hard not to compare this to its successor Shadow Showdown. The other FOP focuses in on the fantastical and allows the developers to build huge, elaborate levels with bizarre mechanics and designs. Breakin' Da Rules sticks with the human world and the established FOP episodes, to its detriment. The level centered around Timmy's neighborhood is empty and miserable, its almost haunting. It doesn't feel lonely in Shadow Showdown when you're journeying through someone's dream or investigating a spooky mansion. It would be easy to call this a beta for Shadow Showdown until you look at all the same files I did. If they centered in on developing Timmy's central model and mechanics, even if it meant losing my girl Timantha, the game might at least feel alright to play. But they had to program all the ways these different models had to move and it clearly bogged the game down. The actual art decision and level design are messy, but at least that can be something I know they learned from moving forward. The mechanics themselves are similarly flawed. Each level requires collecting five stars for a wish, which typically involves "press this button to progress" with no change to the actual gameplay. The game operates on the life system, which most platformers had moved past already. Losing all your lives get punted past to the last save point, which forces you to repeat tedious and dull levels just to reach whatever stupid thing trapped you for so long. You just get the sense this game suffered from poor direction even beyond being an underfunded licensed game in the 00s. Its a real shame but its tempered with the face that the sequel is so much better.

And also, I learned to mod shit in the pursuit of fulfilling some childhood dreams, so I gotta give that to it.