Who said that games in which the main characters are animals are unpopular. In fact, there are quite a few of them.
The reason for the Stray hype is absolutely clear – the game is cute and meowing. Let’s take a look at the most important stuff you should know about the game.
Description of Stray
The game looks really amazing and stylish. Like green bushes from the prologue, like abandoned quarters of a dead city, like sterile laboratories. All this creates an oppressive atmosphere of an abandoned world. Colors are added by the sound design, pointwise playing on immersion. Disappeared people of an advanced civilization, leaving behind tons of garbage and robots that began to imitate the creators. You won’t expect a special philosophy from this game, but no one has said this.
Stray was developed by BlueTwelve Studio, a small team from the south of France, consisting mainly of cats and a few people. The game will have to take care of the cat, just like in real life. And in real life, this can be done with the help of responsible pet care, good treats and dna test for cats.
Gameplay
Stray is a third-person game that offers a cat-eye view of the city. Gamers need to wander through the neon streets of the cyber city, carefully explore it, avoid dangers and solve puzzles.
Gameplay is a walking simulator. The cat walks mostly on linear levels. The game is mostly calm, but at the control points you need to run away from the zerks. In breaks from walking, you can open safes and search for items. Stray turned out to be incredibly light in all her activities. Even when she tried to become a horror, mysterious or when there was a need to look for objects.
Several buttons are used to control the cat: character movement, jumping, running and interacting with objects. Such control helps to pass any stage of the game without problems, and even a child can master it – a definite plus. But an adult, who has the baggage of completed projects behind him, will get bored.
What else can a player as a cat do? Of course, sleep, meow loudly and rub against NPCs. Also at some levels there are elements of an open world with free movement.
Goals
The player will have to lead the tailed one through the inhabited ruins of some highly developed civilization, find friends, face the predatory horror of the new world and finally find out where those damn “skin bags” have gone, who once adored soda and stories about brave heroes.
Plot
The nameless cat lives in some post-apocalyptic ruins along with his relatives. And he does everything that is characteristic of cats, namely, he wanders aimlessly all day long, basks with his relatives and feels great.
But one day a pack of cats goes on a journey to another place. And during an unsuccessful jump, the main character falls into the abyss, from which there is no way to return to his family. To do this, the cat needs to explore the cyberpunk slums inhabited by anthropomorphic people and zerks that devour everything in their path.
The developers took a very responsible attitude to the implementation of the main character Stray, so they actively monitored their pets. But if you think about it a little, then cats spend their days rather aimlessly. They sharpen their claws, lick themselves, run around, drop something or break something for fun. And millions of other cute things like that.
The cat will have to pass all the tests with the help of a drone and return to his cat family on the surface.
Briefly: For 5 hours, the cat and the B-12 drone go to the target, help robots on the way, collect collectibles and escape from monsters called zurkas. Dialogues with characters, surroundings, and the history of the local world are catchy and interesting to watch.
Conclusion
In a relatively short duration (6-8 hours depending on your pace), Stray manages to fall in love with himself as a whole, and not just with the red and fluffy protagonist.
So if you’re willing to put up with that kind of gameplay a bit, Stray will definitely stick in your mind. Add to this surprisingly high-quality graphics for such a small development team and pleasant sound design – and you have a candidate for the main indie game of 2022.
However, all of the above may not be so important. After all, Stray is a game about a cat. Namely, cats rule the world.
P.S. There are no links with the first series of the anthology “Love, Death and Robots”, with which they like to compare the game, in this case.