Going by headlines, ours is a broken world. The pandemic, war on Ukraine, mass shootings, political unrest… it seems upheavals are outpacing many of the positives around us, like declining child mortality and better grip over extreme poverty. In this broken world enters a video game with enough originality. Stray cuts through samey plots and game design. The best part of the game is that the player takes on the role of a cat, the furry friend that’s often a reservoir of affection, a companion that offers an uncomplicated definition of love and life.
In the game from BlueTwelve Studio (publishers being Annapurna Interactive) we plunge into a post-apocalyptic setting where humans have disappeared but cats have proved hardy. It’s a world of concrete imagination as you slip through a crevice, landing in a laboratory that’s home to a flying drone called B12 that quickly becomes your — that is, the cat’s — companion. In the neon-soaked city, B12 becomes a translator for all the other sentient robots that are present. The idea is to escape the city of robots after a lot of exploration and solving light puzzles.
But slipping into a cat’s body comes with its challenges. The protagonist can jump higher than a human, fit in strange places and can be awfully creative, especially when it comes to reaching rooftops. There are times when you need to use the paws quickly to escape alien-looking creatures. In case they do catch up and pile up on you, simply shake them off. If the going gets tough, turn to B12 for suggestions.
The puzzles and explorations are fun but not too difficult, especially if you have grown up on games from the ’90s. For example, to get access to a worker’s jacket from a store, get a music tape and play it on the store’s music system so that the attendant walks away, allowing you to pounce on the jacket. To keep the gameplay brisk, there is very little backtracking and with the completion of an objective, you move to the next level.
Giving the game a unique vibe is the aesthetics of Kowloon Walled City, which was demolished in 1993-94. It was once considered the most densely populated spot on earth and it captured the imagination of film-makers and video games, like Call of Duty: Black Ops.
A pioneer of the fiction subgenre known as cyberpark, William Gibson writes in his novel Idoru: “There was a place near an airport, Kowloon, when Hong Kong wasn’t China, but there had been a mistake, a long time ago, and that place, very small, many people, it still belonged to China. So there was no law there. An outlaw place. And more and more people crowded in; they built it up, higher. No rules, just building, just people living. Police wouldn’t go there. Drugs and gambling. But people living, too. Factories, restaurants. A city. No laws.”
Stray comes alive in a city devoid of humans and there is a cyberpunk quality to the plot. Yet, even here a cat can be a cat, always ready for a snooze on a cosy spot, like on bookshelves or cushions or snuggle up next to robots. There’s no reward for doing so but why rob a cat of simple joys?!
Sure, you have played puzzles. You have been in dystopian surroundings. You have jumped higher than you could imagine. Yet, nothing comes close to Stray. Of course, it was made by cat-loving people. (And perhaps to spread the cat philosophy/memes.) Most of all, Stray is a power-pack of happiness that we all need, hoping our real-world stories take on a satisfying trajectory someday soon. If not anything, you will come away feeling that cats love humans for being themselves and not for opening a can of tuna.