I don't think this game is worth expounding on too much, and I'll not bury the lede there. That said, I also think it's a perfectly perfect showcase for what the Playstation brand can bring to a Gamepass competitor. Who's to say if they'd entered this sort of market earlier that a game like As Dusk Falls, about as Sony Game a Sony Game that's ever Sony Game'd, would have wound up an XBox exclusive?
Stray fronts a lot of prestige tropes. It's got a Radiohead-esque soundtrack (and lowkey, this is by far its most impressive feature) paired with a telescopic portrayal of Final Fantasy VII's post-cyberpunk aesthetic and an exploration of very NieR: Automata-like ponderings about the nature of humanity and what role robots, let alone nature and the habitats people build to shelter themselves from said nature, have to play in a world without said people.
Stray gets a lot of mileage prior to playing the game out of being a game in which one embodies a cat; if the player owns a cat and just as importantly is predisposed to filming everything on a smartphone rather than simply chuckling at it in their own reality, it seems those players and even more importantly those cats really enjoy hanging out with Stray's unnamed cat.
I'm not a cat pervert, unfortunately. I didn't find it cute that there were nearly a dozen places to take a nap in this game, seemingly half as many places to scratch aimlessly as there were bosses in Elden Ring (spoiler for Elden Ring, or Stray, or both: half the bosses in Elden RIng is still a LOT of scratching stations), some truly pointless (other than a trophy!) interactions with balls of yarn and basketballs (basketballs?) and then the semi-Army Men/Toy Story gimmick of exploring spaces designed for 6-foot adult men as a tiny cat.
And when the cat bit comes last, it's a lot easier to laser focus on how simple the actual game design is. I like to jokingly refer to licensed character action games of the PS1 era that are truly terrible like Garfield's Lasagna World Tour when I get to the nuts and bolts of this game (that game in particular because, y'know, cat memes) but I'm also fairly serious: aside from an appreciably dense if not remarkably challenging Slums area, lose a few hundred thousand polygons here and a number of clever signposting techniques in level design there, Stray is a PS1 game in a 2019 game's clothing, released in 2022.
That sounds insanely harsh to me so I'm sure it'll read practically absurd to others, but I only fixate on that so I don't dwell too much on the fact that - brace yourselves - this is NOT a cat game. It's a game about a tiny floating robot companion with a complicated understanding of its own past and the context within which it can translate any language, open any door and manipulate any form of cybersecurity. I guess I won't spoil exactly why that is, though I admit that's in part because the game doesn't actually think about it too much either.
Anyway, I said I wouldn't pontificate much yet here I am, so: you control a cat in this game, but the cat could just as well be an extremely agile possum and nothing would change other than how cute it is. It vaguely points at some post-apocalyptic themes without any curiosity about what that means for the cat. It's a game all about the little robot friend, peppered with mostly fetch quests and the occasional stealth or chase sequence that in either case mostly imagine what it'd be like to play a vertical Crash Bandicoot level from behind the protagonist. The actual novelty of the cat perspective begins and ends with "this avatar looks like a cat."
Which is to say, again, it's a perfectly good pilot program for what Playstation can offer players as an incentive for their upgraded tiers of Playstation Plus. The puzzles are simple enough that you feel clever completing them on first go, while the art direction, music (the music!) and rudimentary inventory system keep the video game player's lizard brain demanding their fingers push them forward to seeing and hearing more of what Stray has to offer. Other than a really rough start (I wholeheartedly rejected the discovery of the little robot friend) in the first hour, I did the other four in a single sitting. That was nice, having the achievements pop as consistently as they did and the game progress as quickly as I could manage.
That bit was refreshing, I suppose. I liked feeling nostalgic for the sort of gameplay that was undeniably mindblowing when 3D environments were brand new. But the cat perverts really need to chill out - as I said at the top, this is not a cat game. Don't get played.
Stray fronts a lot of prestige tropes. It's got a Radiohead-esque soundtrack (and lowkey, this is by far its most impressive feature) paired with a telescopic portrayal of Final Fantasy VII's post-cyberpunk aesthetic and an exploration of very NieR: Automata-like ponderings about the nature of humanity and what role robots, let alone nature and the habitats people build to shelter themselves from said nature, have to play in a world without said people.
Stray gets a lot of mileage prior to playing the game out of being a game in which one embodies a cat; if the player owns a cat and just as importantly is predisposed to filming everything on a smartphone rather than simply chuckling at it in their own reality, it seems those players and even more importantly those cats really enjoy hanging out with Stray's unnamed cat.
I'm not a cat pervert, unfortunately. I didn't find it cute that there were nearly a dozen places to take a nap in this game, seemingly half as many places to scratch aimlessly as there were bosses in Elden Ring (spoiler for Elden Ring, or Stray, or both: half the bosses in Elden RIng is still a LOT of scratching stations), some truly pointless (other than a trophy!) interactions with balls of yarn and basketballs (basketballs?) and then the semi-Army Men/Toy Story gimmick of exploring spaces designed for 6-foot adult men as a tiny cat.
And when the cat bit comes last, it's a lot easier to laser focus on how simple the actual game design is. I like to jokingly refer to licensed character action games of the PS1 era that are truly terrible like Garfield's Lasagna World Tour when I get to the nuts and bolts of this game (that game in particular because, y'know, cat memes) but I'm also fairly serious: aside from an appreciably dense if not remarkably challenging Slums area, lose a few hundred thousand polygons here and a number of clever signposting techniques in level design there, Stray is a PS1 game in a 2019 game's clothing, released in 2022.
That sounds insanely harsh to me so I'm sure it'll read practically absurd to others, but I only fixate on that so I don't dwell too much on the fact that - brace yourselves - this is NOT a cat game. It's a game about a tiny floating robot companion with a complicated understanding of its own past and the context within which it can translate any language, open any door and manipulate any form of cybersecurity. I guess I won't spoil exactly why that is, though I admit that's in part because the game doesn't actually think about it too much either.
Anyway, I said I wouldn't pontificate much yet here I am, so: you control a cat in this game, but the cat could just as well be an extremely agile possum and nothing would change other than how cute it is. It vaguely points at some post-apocalyptic themes without any curiosity about what that means for the cat. It's a game all about the little robot friend, peppered with mostly fetch quests and the occasional stealth or chase sequence that in either case mostly imagine what it'd be like to play a vertical Crash Bandicoot level from behind the protagonist. The actual novelty of the cat perspective begins and ends with "this avatar looks like a cat."
Which is to say, again, it's a perfectly good pilot program for what Playstation can offer players as an incentive for their upgraded tiers of Playstation Plus. The puzzles are simple enough that you feel clever completing them on first go, while the art direction, music (the music!) and rudimentary inventory system keep the video game player's lizard brain demanding their fingers push them forward to seeing and hearing more of what Stray has to offer. Other than a really rough start (I wholeheartedly rejected the discovery of the little robot friend) in the first hour, I did the other four in a single sitting. That was nice, having the achievements pop as consistently as they did and the game progress as quickly as I could manage.
That bit was refreshing, I suppose. I liked feeling nostalgic for the sort of gameplay that was undeniably mindblowing when 3D environments were brand new. But the cat perverts really need to chill out - as I said at the top, this is not a cat game. Don't get played.