Stray is a game where you play as a cat. It starts off introducing the cat that you’re going to be playing as, who is part of a group of four living in what looks like an overgrown abandoned set of ruins. The titular stray cat gets separated from the others and finds itself in a weird, abandoned city. At first you don’t know what happened, what this city is, or even when this game takes place. however, various hints are uncovered as the story progresses. The people that lived there seemed to have abandoned the city, living behind on the unusual machines and bugs to inhabit it.
The gameplay is simplistic. As a cat you can run and jump on surfaces, as well as push certain things around. A lot of the fun in the beginning is the novelty of playing as a cat but at its core, this game is too simple, and the controls can even feel clunky at times. For an indie game, it has impressive graphics. In particular, the design of the city perfectly captures how restrictive and claustrophobic it is. The addition of the large neon lights and signs add a cyberpunk atmosphere to the game that perfectly captures the abandoned nature of the city. The developers seemed to have realised that the smaller body of the cat may induce motion sickness to people who are prone to it, and so included an option to include a reticule.
The story is initially told via the visuals and environments, but eventually, you’ll come to see robots and then the dialogue appears. The dialogue bit can come off as disappointing as a unique aspect would be if it had managed to tell the story through visuals alone. The story itself is so so. It had all the ingredients to be an intriguing piece that is filled with the wonder of finding out what happened. Yet what happens in actuality is that you can soon piece together the history of the city and how it came to be in this state as it is something that has been done many times before. It’s a wasted opportunity.
After the novelty of playing as a cat wears off, the game becomes quite mundane as it boils down to some simple platforming and interactions with NPCs. There are some light puzzle solving, but these puzzles usually have obvious solutions. The biggest downside to the game is how the cat does not have any offensive abilities for a large portion of the game. This is understandable and would be fine if not for the fact that it has those sections where things will attack the cat, but there’s little you can do to defend yourself. It's annoying and the purpose of those sections is to make you feel the same panic as one would in that type of scenario, but it doesn’t translate into an enjoyable experience.
For a game with such a minimalist UI and gameplay, it does a good job at pointing you in the right direction. There are visual cues such as neon signs and lights that point to a specific direction. The level design is mainly linear, however, there is one part later in the game which is a bit more open with less guidance. You may get a tiny bit lost there at what you need to do in order to progress the story.
The game is very easy, with the combat and stealth sections being simple and obvious. It is weird how much the game changes when you compare the first half to the second half. The first half had a different one where it was more bleak, and you had these aggressive enemies threatening to devour the cat. Then in the second, it’s intense in a different way, as the enemy is now non-organic, and everything takes on a more processed, cold feel to it. The disappearance of one enemy type only to be replaced by another feels at odds with each other. The ending itself is predictable and it takes less than four hours to get to it, even in your first playthrough.
There are some sidequests throughout the game. These usually involving you finding some collectibles to return to an NPC. These sidequests are missable because if you progress too far into the story, you cannot return those areas unless you go via Chapter Select. It’s not a huge deal but it’s points like these that can make the game’s generic nature come to the forefront. There are also a bunch of optional things that the cat can do, such as meowing and scratching things, which adds to the atmosphere, rather than to the substance of the game.
Overall, Stray is an okay game. The biggest appeal is playing as a cat and seeing all the effort that has been put into its animations. After that surface level appeal has been satisfied, you can see that the game is overly simple and repetitive. The story is fine but despite not being too original, there are enough intriguing things to keep your interest in finding out more about it. the other impressive element of the game are the graphics given that this is an indie title, but that’s about all that the game has going for it. It’s still a worthwhile play, but just that it did not really utilize all of its potential.
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