The question ‘what is a video game’ is a broad one. I’d say it’s broader than “what’s a movie,” “what’s a television show,” “what’s a book,” and “what’s a song.” Video games are the largest mass-market media – they take the longest to create and experience, making them hard to pin down. However, Stray is undoubtedly a video game, and that’s what makes it an immersive – and joyful – experience.
Storytelling in video games has gotten significantly stronger over the past year and a half, but that has introduced a new problem for gaming. Many of our very best games now feel like movies. The Last of Us, God of War and Ghost of Tsushima all follow the same emotional beats and as impressive as they are to play, they are all built with a desire to emulate the prestige of movies. Days Gone tries and falls short.
Red Dead Redemption 2 lets you create your own fun off the beaten path, but if you stick to the main story, it’s very clear that it’s channeling movie as a core inspiration. Val Kilmer’s Doc Holliday has a definite influence on Arthur Morgan, while Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch sets the game in general. I think the growing maturity of gaming is amazing, and RDR2 is one of my favorite games. There’s nothing wrong with taking influence from movies, even if Sony uses the same kind of movie too often, but it’s still so refreshing that Stray is a video game every inch.
There is no real story here. To quote another famous western: Narrative? We have no story. We don’t need a story. I don’t have to show you a stinky story! The game is about a cat who falls into a robot city and has to get out. That is it. Guided by a drone, they meet some robot characters along the way, but these all drift along the edge of the story. Even the drone is more exposition than companionship. In a movie or TV show, you have to cram the exploration full of wacky characters or adventures with a fixed beginning, middle and end. Games trust you much more to go at your own pace.
Stray starts out quite linear and then flows into a city hub for you to explore. The streets are soaked with neon, beautifully painted, rancid with trash and teeming with life. It’s made up of cyberpunk cliches, but put together so effectively that it uses this familiarity to feel fresh. You may go ‘wrong’ or end up doubling where you came from, but it always feels like your adventure. It’s completely pointless at times, as only video games can be. My occasional concern that video games are trying to resemble movies is not caused by my dislike of movies, but by my respect for video games. We can do things that no other medium can, and the more we copy what others do, the less we take advantage of our own uniqueness.
Stray is smaller in scope than some of gaming’s biggest players, but it never forgets it’s a video game first and always builds on that idea. It will probably be talked about as The Cat Game, and playing as a cat is a fun gimmick, but Stray is so much more, and it deserves our respect.
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