This review contains spoilers
For every minor success Stray has with conveying the notion of being a cat, there are approximately a dozen reminders that the game's imagination is limited to aping the conventions of generic third-person "prestige" games as well as the indie template made popular in recent years by Playdead Studios--and even then, doing so in some questionable ways.
I would go as far as to say that Stray is only successful at all in little moments, when you can wholly embrace the chaos that only a cat can bring. I had minor amounts of fun aimlessly pushing paint cans onto apartment floors or city streets and then stepping through the spilled paint and spreading paw prints. I say "aimlessly" because almost every other remotely appealing cat action has been turned into a collectible or trophy of some kind, a repetitive and specifically designed task that shows the developers "get" cats, like scratching up carpet or rubbing up against predetermined robots. Replace carpets with audio logs and cat rubs with handshakes or some rough equivalent, however, and suddenly this game could have easily featured a human character and nothing would even feel that different. They even give the cat a "voice" by pairing it with a robot companion named B-12, maybe the game's biggest mistake as the last thing I wanted from games like Limbo or Inside [which I'm not crazy about to begin with] was an abundance of writing. I guess the traversal up buildings is meant to be the exciting cat thing? I hope you like pressing X a lot to navigate predetermined platforms! Or simply holding it in the blessed few sequences where it makes sense to do so. A lot of these choices seem to be made not to convey anything exciting about being a cat but instead a lack of faith in players to interpret and succeed on their own terms, and an insistence on making the experience familiar.
Even if the base story elements were good enough to make up for how generic Stray feels to play, it's hard to take them seriously. When it goes for serious reveals or emotional moments, they tend to land absent of any impact due to the flat text log that B-12 soullessly presents on the screen. It could stand to learn a lot from titles that present wordless emotional exchanges. The other barrier preventing me from taking the story very seriously is one of the enemy types Stray presents. The antagonist for much of the game comes in the form of Zurks, little mutant creatures that consume anything and everything. Aesthetically they're wildly out of place, a hybrid of Half-Life creatures that sound like mice and look like bloated insects. They're also kind of pathetic as a threat, as you only ever encounter them in scenarios where they're easily avoidable, whether it's tedious chase sequences or tedious puzzle rooms. You even briefly get a "gun" to deal with them, which is somehow one of the least satisfying weapons I've ever encountered [and considering how long you have it maybe they knew that]. The silly creature design reminds me a lot of the Last of Us franchise, which apparently decided zombies were too played out but then had its own form of zombies that look ridiculous.
Nothing gets any better by the end, including stealth segments where the design appears to have started and stopped with the thought "well cats love boxes" because they're otherwise any other stealth sequence from popular games of the past. It's so disappointing because the promise of Stray was something that felt any different whatsoever from countless action adventure titles, and instead it's, well, this.
I would go as far as to say that Stray is only successful at all in little moments, when you can wholly embrace the chaos that only a cat can bring. I had minor amounts of fun aimlessly pushing paint cans onto apartment floors or city streets and then stepping through the spilled paint and spreading paw prints. I say "aimlessly" because almost every other remotely appealing cat action has been turned into a collectible or trophy of some kind, a repetitive and specifically designed task that shows the developers "get" cats, like scratching up carpet or rubbing up against predetermined robots. Replace carpets with audio logs and cat rubs with handshakes or some rough equivalent, however, and suddenly this game could have easily featured a human character and nothing would even feel that different. They even give the cat a "voice" by pairing it with a robot companion named B-12, maybe the game's biggest mistake as the last thing I wanted from games like Limbo or Inside [which I'm not crazy about to begin with] was an abundance of writing. I guess the traversal up buildings is meant to be the exciting cat thing? I hope you like pressing X a lot to navigate predetermined platforms! Or simply holding it in the blessed few sequences where it makes sense to do so. A lot of these choices seem to be made not to convey anything exciting about being a cat but instead a lack of faith in players to interpret and succeed on their own terms, and an insistence on making the experience familiar.
Even if the base story elements were good enough to make up for how generic Stray feels to play, it's hard to take them seriously. When it goes for serious reveals or emotional moments, they tend to land absent of any impact due to the flat text log that B-12 soullessly presents on the screen. It could stand to learn a lot from titles that present wordless emotional exchanges. The other barrier preventing me from taking the story very seriously is one of the enemy types Stray presents. The antagonist for much of the game comes in the form of Zurks, little mutant creatures that consume anything and everything. Aesthetically they're wildly out of place, a hybrid of Half-Life creatures that sound like mice and look like bloated insects. They're also kind of pathetic as a threat, as you only ever encounter them in scenarios where they're easily avoidable, whether it's tedious chase sequences or tedious puzzle rooms. You even briefly get a "gun" to deal with them, which is somehow one of the least satisfying weapons I've ever encountered [and considering how long you have it maybe they knew that]. The silly creature design reminds me a lot of the Last of Us franchise, which apparently decided zombies were too played out but then had its own form of zombies that look ridiculous.
Nothing gets any better by the end, including stealth segments where the design appears to have started and stopped with the thought "well cats love boxes" because they're otherwise any other stealth sequence from popular games of the past. It's so disappointing because the promise of Stray was something that felt any different whatsoever from countless action adventure titles, and instead it's, well, this.