I not have the hard data about this, but I assume it took less than five seconds from the release of Stray's first trailer for somebody to it the “cyberpunk cat game.” And, boy, did it ever catch on. Whenever you Google that phrase now, the top result is Stray's Steam page, accompanied by trailers along with a couple of news headlines which use those three words (or close variants) as a shorthand for that game's premise.
I too spent months considering Stray because the “cyberpunk cat game,” and also the more I sat with this description, the greater I found myself wondering the way you could fashion the above things right into a cohesive whole. Superficially, sure, I acquired it. Stray includes a cat exploring a city full of neon and graffiti and robots, and our fuzzy main character even gets a drone companion, B-12, to assist them on their own journey. Cat plus cyberpunk. However i was curious how developer BlueTwelve Studio would merge the 2 tips on a deeper level.
After all, the cyberpunk genre comes prepackaged with a bunch of concepts that just really register in the scale of humans and also the society they inhabit. Beneath all the technology and neon and rain-slick streets, good cyberpunk is about the ways oppressive power structures entrench themselves in the objects and spaces humans build within the physical world. It is a critique of the present as much as it's a vision of the future, drawing a straight line from our late-capitalist hell towards the even more dystopian outgrowth that may soon await us. Often, though not invariably, it's about how we may use exactly the same tools that subjugate us to fight for meaningful change.
And the protagonist in Stray, to be clear, isn't intended as the sort of anthropomorphized cat we usually get in cartoons and video games. They're not Sylvester or Garfield or perhaps one of the numerous animated cats that do not speak but still demonstrate humanish emotions, like Mochi in Big Hero 6. Stray's protagonist is, at least on the surface, a genuine Cat. As being a stray in a far-future world where humanity has seemingly gone extinct, they do not even have a name1Stray's promotions are vague, apparently intentionally, concerning the sex in our feline protagonist, and also the topic never comes up in the game itself. There are-and I cannot believe I am writing this-no visible genitals around the cat. They have an orange coat, but that thing you might've learned about all orange cats being toms isn't true. Though rare, female orange cats are available. So I'm sticking with “they.”.
Real cats lead uncomplicated lives. They get pleasure from simple things and live wholly in our. They spend their time chilling at the base tiers of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. What I'm bothering is, should you told the smartest cat in the world that we required to throw off the shackles in our corporatist society, they would not rally for your cause and slap on a tiny revolutionary beret, regardless of how impassioned your speechifying. The only real injustice cats are capable of recognizing may be the unequal distribution of treats.
To BlueTwelve's credit, Stray doesn't actually sell out either half of that premise-the cyberpunk or the cat-for the sake of telling a tale. The elements of excellent, thoughtful cyberpunk can be found and accounted for, even more so compared to a particular other game that took way more people way longer to make and literally had “cyberpunk” in the title. Nor does Stray cheaply project human emotions onto its furry hero. In fact, the commitment to feline plausibility is thorough enough the ending, without giving anything away, actually feels a bit sociopathic. You don't really get the sense the cat likes you anything they've done over the past 8 hours, other than, perhaps, the scary parts are over.
But Stray does, perhaps inevitably, betray the idea that you're playing as a Real Cat through its gameplay. Don't get me wrong: BlueTwelve has been doing a phenomenal job of transforming a wide range of cat-accurate behaviors into gameplay actions. You are able to walk on keyboards, swat objects off ledges, scratch at furniture, take naps, rub against an amiable leg, meow for no reason, and leap often your height onto ledges. The animations for those these things aren't anything lacking stellar, expertly observed and deftly recreated. It's just the way all those cat verbs wind up strung together, as a number of objectives and puzzles, feels distinctly uncatlike.
In the opening minutes everything is straightforward enough to become sensible. The cat is chilling using their group of companions, sleeping via a rainstorm and then going out on patrol. After a nasty fall, our hero is trapped in an unfamiliar place, unable to get back home. They move ahead within the only direction which can be found for them, encountering creatures, called zurks, that resemble miniature headcrabs. While they seem harmless at first, the zurks eventually turn violent, leading to a chase that feels delightfully unlike any similar sequence I've ever played-more harried, more frantic, and more authentically cat.
But even here, in early stages, before you're deep into any cyberpunk narrative, you will find little betrayals. There's the moment, for instance, whenever you stumbled upon a spinning fan blocking the journey forward. The answer, as you'll eventually exercise, is to grab a bucket from down below, climb back up, and drop the bucket in to the fan, stopping the blades. This, by itself, is already so far removed from the way a cat could possibly reason as to be laughable. I'm fairly certain if I sealed my two cats in a room having a fan and a bucket, they'd starve to death or get themselves decapitated before they figured out how you can stop the blades.
Like I said, this was all probably inevitable, especially in a game title that's trying to tell a journey story. That a work of media requires us to suspend disbelief isn't in itself a criticism. But that doesn't prevent feeling weird, particularly in this context. Viewed with the lens of gameplay, the kitty in Stray is a kind of Schr”odinger's cat-not simultaneously alive and dead, but simultaneously cat and never cat, both human and animal.
The situation only gets more muddled when you team up using the drone, B-12. The sport repeatedly frames all of your actions-hacking doors, starting conversations, showing objects to NPCs-as originating using the cat. Despite as being a sentient machine, B-12 may be the one taking orders. The kitty somehow uses him, per button prompts. And even when B-12 has guidance to the cat, he does so with language, which makes no sense. Obviously, it will seem sensible, because he's really speaking with you, the player, and you're steering the kitty. But it breaks immersion to become constantly reminded of your presence as puppet master, the ghost in Stray's machine. It's dissonant.
At some point, I wondered whether it may be easy to salvage this part of the game by thinking of it as being a comedy of unlikely coincidences, like the old Mr. Magoo cartoons. Most likely the cat actually isn't hearing anything anyone tells these to do rather it is just happening to complete the precise right thing that should happen for the story to succeed by living their cat life and doing cat things. Maybe the game is actually poking fun at anthropomorphism, mocking how we project complex human motives onto animals that don't actually possess them.
As neat as it could be, though, that framing can't really hold up to scrutiny. When the cat is somehow reading the four-digit numbers scrawled on your wall and making the drone input them into a keypad, we're with the looking glass.
There's grounds that Stray's best segment, undoubtedly, is a level in the first 1 / 2 of the game, when you are set loose in the city's slums. Dense alleyways disguise dozens of little interactions. Vending machines, air conditioning units, and rusted pipes weave numerous pathways to a separate rooftop world above. This is actually the game unfurling your decision, asking not only to undertake linear pathways with the agility of the cat, but to see an entire, fully realized space through new feline eyes. Sure, you're exploring to solve puzzles and tick off some objective boxes, but the fun from it comes from something entirely plausible: a cat within an unfamiliar environment, charting their new territory, chasing after whatever seems interesting and knocking over a good deal of stuff along the way.
The biggest shame of Stray would be that the game quickly proceeds to close back up, and the dimensionality from the slums chapters never really returns to any meaningful degree. Your trip spokes off into linear levels, so when you eventually start another open area, it's almost totally flat by comparison, both literally and figuratively. Back-half segments that fall under a lot more conventional gameplay frameworks-like giving you ammunition to fight back against the zurks or forcing you into stealth encounters complete with color-coded vision cones-aren't poorly executed, however they only serve to drag you further out of the illusion that you are the cat.
Look, I don't mean to say this unresolved tension between protagonist and premise ruins Stray. It does not. This can be a finely made, enjoyable game that you won't regret playing. However i do find myself wondering what Stray might be like if BlueTwelve had dedicated to building something that let's more truly embody a cat-not just with what we can do, but in how we begin to see the world and just what we try to accomplish within it. To exist in a town without the need to understand it, without having to bear the load of being its savior, unintentional or else, would make for any far more interesting fantasy compared to much safer one Stray offers instead.
