What a huge waste of time. For the player. For the devs. For the artists who designed the assets that make the world feel alive and detailed. What was the point of any of it? Why did they do all of this work, just to make a pretty mediocre easy-mode adventure game? It's frustrating. Couldn't they have worked on a nice little short film instead? Compete with Pixar for once? There's a ton of high quality stuff here! Stray tells a nice story about a lost cat and its adventures in a robot world; you go off and do favors for people as you find your footing, gaining a robot companion named B-12 along the way. The whole time I played it I was annoyed that there was not a jump button.
The lost cat, having slipped away from its companions and down into a dank, mysterious, walled city, has the obvious goal of getting out, of going "Outside." See there's a group of robots in that city known as "The Outsiders," the cat allies with these Outsiders and works in concert with them to develop the technology to get Out. Along the way you learn a little bit about the world you've found yourself in. There are comical story beats where your cat-activity of scratching up the furniture uncovers a secret, that kind of thing. The cat, though a little uncanny (I played on PS4), is convincingly charming if you're a sucker for that kind of stuff. It'll curl up into a ball at some spots, especially one, and you can see they're trying to go for the internet cat love thing. And it's well done, they deserve it.
But so why a video game? You don't need this to be a video game to get all of that. There's some stuff I haven't mentioned--Zergs, a jail segment, some minor stealth elements--that benefit a bit from the videogame format. There's a tension you just can't get to from a movie. But everything else, the world navigation, the "platforming," it is so easy it may as well play itself. This game is functionally a walking simulator, except instead of walking as a person you walk as a cat. Now walking simulators are not bad in and of themselves, I like quite a few of them myself, but realizing you're playing one when you wanted a platformer is disappointing. And even moreso, realizing how much the game would rock as a platformer dissapoints even harder. A lot of the game's navigation is about jumping on stuff, but you can only jump on stuff once there's a button prompt. This creates a disconnect--in a traditional platformer you'll learn your jump range, how high you can go, movement tricks--in this one there's nothing to learn, just look at where the green circle appears.
Does that kind of strict control sound cat-like? What do you know about cats. What are the like, known, essential traits of cats. Cats are known as being fickle or stubborn, they don't often do what you'd like them to do. They're agile, and fast, though occasionally goofy. The internet thinks they're adorable and is obsessed with 'em. They're great subjects for platformers, although it hasn't been done as often as you'd think. Good platformers enable quick, agile movement, and cats are--to some degree--thought of as being quick and agile. Super Mario 3D World and Rain World are probably the biggest examples of cat-based video gaming, the latter featuring a "slugcat" with really tight platforming. Rain World really immerses you in the feeling of being a slugcat. The controls are tight and difficult, and you look dumb when you mess up. The world is mean and unfair, and you feel on a deep level where you are on the food chain. It's might not be fair to compare Rain World and Stray too closely, they're clearly going for different things.
But both games decided to make the focus of their game a cat. A slugcat, in one, sure, but the choice of subject is interesting here. There is a sharp difference in approach and intention. Rain World wanted to put you in the shoes of the slugcat, to set up through its mechanics a kind of grammar to navigate its world. It's a simulator, to some degree. Though, it's worth pointing out that Rain World can be prohibitively difficult, to its detriment, and that Stray kind of exists at the other end of a spectrum here; Stray can be annoyingly easy, to its detriment.
That is all to say that Stray is not a simulator. Stray tells you a story and puts you on an audiovisual adventure. It's gorgeous, and kind of fun, and even has a little gameplay here and there. But on a mechanical level its boring, and maybe even a little lazy sometimes. And it's dumb to focus a "talk to guy do favor for him" game on a cat. People will play this game because its a cat doing cat stuff, and shit brother that's why I played it too. But on the whole. Eh.
The lost cat, having slipped away from its companions and down into a dank, mysterious, walled city, has the obvious goal of getting out, of going "Outside." See there's a group of robots in that city known as "The Outsiders," the cat allies with these Outsiders and works in concert with them to develop the technology to get Out. Along the way you learn a little bit about the world you've found yourself in. There are comical story beats where your cat-activity of scratching up the furniture uncovers a secret, that kind of thing. The cat, though a little uncanny (I played on PS4), is convincingly charming if you're a sucker for that kind of stuff. It'll curl up into a ball at some spots, especially one, and you can see they're trying to go for the internet cat love thing. And it's well done, they deserve it.
But so why a video game? You don't need this to be a video game to get all of that. There's some stuff I haven't mentioned--Zergs, a jail segment, some minor stealth elements--that benefit a bit from the videogame format. There's a tension you just can't get to from a movie. But everything else, the world navigation, the "platforming," it is so easy it may as well play itself. This game is functionally a walking simulator, except instead of walking as a person you walk as a cat. Now walking simulators are not bad in and of themselves, I like quite a few of them myself, but realizing you're playing one when you wanted a platformer is disappointing. And even moreso, realizing how much the game would rock as a platformer dissapoints even harder. A lot of the game's navigation is about jumping on stuff, but you can only jump on stuff once there's a button prompt. This creates a disconnect--in a traditional platformer you'll learn your jump range, how high you can go, movement tricks--in this one there's nothing to learn, just look at where the green circle appears.
Does that kind of strict control sound cat-like? What do you know about cats. What are the like, known, essential traits of cats. Cats are known as being fickle or stubborn, they don't often do what you'd like them to do. They're agile, and fast, though occasionally goofy. The internet thinks they're adorable and is obsessed with 'em. They're great subjects for platformers, although it hasn't been done as often as you'd think. Good platformers enable quick, agile movement, and cats are--to some degree--thought of as being quick and agile. Super Mario 3D World and Rain World are probably the biggest examples of cat-based video gaming, the latter featuring a "slugcat" with really tight platforming. Rain World really immerses you in the feeling of being a slugcat. The controls are tight and difficult, and you look dumb when you mess up. The world is mean and unfair, and you feel on a deep level where you are on the food chain. It's might not be fair to compare Rain World and Stray too closely, they're clearly going for different things.
But both games decided to make the focus of their game a cat. A slugcat, in one, sure, but the choice of subject is interesting here. There is a sharp difference in approach and intention. Rain World wanted to put you in the shoes of the slugcat, to set up through its mechanics a kind of grammar to navigate its world. It's a simulator, to some degree. Though, it's worth pointing out that Rain World can be prohibitively difficult, to its detriment, and that Stray kind of exists at the other end of a spectrum here; Stray can be annoyingly easy, to its detriment.
That is all to say that Stray is not a simulator. Stray tells you a story and puts you on an audiovisual adventure. It's gorgeous, and kind of fun, and even has a little gameplay here and there. But on a mechanical level its boring, and maybe even a little lazy sometimes. And it's dumb to focus a "talk to guy do favor for him" game on a cat. People will play this game because its a cat doing cat stuff, and shit brother that's why I played it too. But on the whole. Eh.
2 Comments
@farmstink shut the fuck up
Farmstink
1 year ago