Stray is a beautiful, poignant meditation on history's mistakes and on how future generations are left to -- and, with luck and determination, can -- pick up the pieces.

This game is being described as a platformer, but I don't think that's accurate. It's an exploration game. You traverse a post-apocalyptic cyberpunk city, with your progress being gated by environmental puzzles, locked doors, and occasionally hostile NPCs. People are calling it a platformer because of its emphasis on jumping and verticality, but the jumps themselves are handled by contextual button-presses -- you can't actually miss a jump.

The real joy of Stray lies in appreciating its world. Art direction, color and lighting, music and sound meld to place the player in a neon-lit purgatory that somehow manages to feel both cavernous and cozy. The choice of a cat protagonist is a stroke of genius here, as it helps the city -- which is objectively somewhat small by modern video game city standards -- to feel like a massive place in which to get lost exploring every alley and rooftop.

The game's shortcomings feel pretty minor after a first playthrough. My main complaint has to do with the jumping mechanics: it was often hard for me to tell where I could and couldn't jump, and progress in a given direction was often barred by the unexplained absence of a jump prompt for a surface that seemed clearly within reach.

I don't really know how to rate simple mobile games like this, since it feels weird to compare them to full-size games on console or PC. This one's quite fun. The touchscreen controls are slightly wonky in a way that feels kind of intentional, but also gives a decided advantage to people who choose to play with a controller. The matchmaking is also pretty bad -- there's no way to tell what your opponent's rank is unless they choose to reveal it through a banner or emote, but I know from that that I was frequently matched against players one, two, or even three tiers above me.

Unlike many players, this game's core gameplay loop had me hooked from the beginning. I loved just traversing the environment on foot or by bike, holding my breath as I nervously tried to sneak past enemies, etc. As the game progressed, I got deep into building up infrastructure that would allow me to carry packages all over the network easily and without risk of being attacked. I ended up spending hours maxing out my rating with every single settlement. So, needless to say, I had fun with the game.

The writing is standard Kojima, which is to say not standard at all. I really love the way it explored its central themes of isolation and connection, life and death, etc. The way it plays on the ambiguity of the word "strand" is legitimately poetic and especially impressive for someone whose first language isn't English. All that said, the story kind of gets folded in on itself and the mythology becomes so convoluted that it becomes difficult to tell what the game is trying to say. Again, though, that's classic Kojima.

All in all, I'm delighted that the AAA space has room for games like this, and I eagerly await the next offering from one of gaming's great geniuses.

I really don't know how to score games like this.

On the one hand, it's unrelentingly, psychedelically beautiful. This is clearly the main thing the game sets out to achieve and it achieves it spectacularly.

On the other hand, I find myself asking the same question I asked after playing Night In The Woods: Why is this a video game? In my view, none of what's great about this game is enhanced by the smidge of interactivity they've included -- if anything, the interactivity makes it worse. It means that the ecstatic flow of the main character prancing through a fantastical world wailing on their holographic guitar is occasionally interrupted by moments of player error. It means that the pacing is thrown off by the need to occasionally give the player the ability to walk around an environment rather than just showing that environment cinematically.

Disclaimer: I didn't actually finish the game. I put a couple dozen hours into it -- long enough to get to what I've heard is the game's big plot turning point -- and was bored the entire time.

Pretty much everything about the game feels like they made a generic shonen anime into a generic JRPG. I might have loved it back when I was a ten-year-old obsessed with Dragon Ball, but it does almost nothing for me now.

That said, if "shonen anime in JRPG form" sounds appealing to you, you'll probably like it. It's well executed for what it is.