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What is this? I cry as I emerge from the staggering basement, blinking. A game? A really new game with some buzz around it and graphics and absolutely no shitty deck building? Rise from your graves, industry correspondents! The drought is over! The sun has risen on a new era of – oh I read it in four hours. Well, it was hardly worth turning off the wank basement air conditioning. Yes, it’s Stray, a post-apocalyptic cyberpunk adventure thingy with the central selling point of you playing as a cute, wutey ickle wickle kitty witty and there’s a special special meow button. I think a game where you play as a cat is unprecedented – a non-anthropomorphic cat, I hasten to add, before your Blinx the Time Sweeper loyalists come harassing my bollock sockets – dog people have had Okami and that one level from Call of Duty Ghosts but until now there has never been an equivalent for the Garfield readers of the world. Probably because video games are task oriented by nature and while a dog will follow commands as long as you feed or praise them or stay in the same room as them, your average cat wouldn’t lift a paw to get back in its own life support machine if it thought you were commanding it. to do this.

But in any case. As Stray opens, our adorable wutey ickle wickle protago wotagonist wakes up in some sort of overgrown abandoned industrial facility with three of their siblings and immediately we move and steer very convincingly like a cat because all we can do is to one of the other cats and then press the contextual “spaz out for no reason” button. After dutifully spitting them all out one by one, the actual game begins and we travel through the facility for the most part by pressing forward and looking for the contextual “jump to here” button. Soon we lose our footing and fall into a big dark pit while our siblings watch and do everything they can to help because they are cats. “Look if I ever lash out at those ungrateful bastards again,” you seem to say as you wake up in a sewer and embark on an adventure through a walled cyberpunk city to find your way back out. Initially by pressing forward and looking for the contextual “jump to here” button. And all the time I do it I silently pray, “Please don’t be a walking sim. For God’s sake. I’ve been waiting all summer. Introduce a core mechanism where we have to dodge rollers when an enemy robot tries to spray us with the water bottle .

As the series of contextual fast chases continued, things didn’t look good. It’s quite inconsistent with what we can and cannot jump on. As an agile little cat, we should be able to navigate any terrain more welcoming than the side of an open baking bean can, and sometimes we can, but sometimes we just can’t because they forgot to put a contextual jump prompt there. place. Things improve over time, but our hero makes friends with a cute wutey ickle wickle droney wone, so now we can interact with the robots populating the city, collecting inventory items and solving puzzles, and some parts of the game take place in open hub cities full of sidequests and quests. And yet we never really settle for a strong core game mechanic to focus on. Sometimes we do inventory puzzles in classic adventure game style, sometimes we run away from monsters, sometimes we fight the monsters with a deadly flashlight, and then we drop all that and some stealth elements creep in as we face an evil oppressive regime, which I think was closer to what I was hoping for from a game where you play like a cat. A sneaky mischievous stealth traversal game where we enrage a big scary guard by jumping on a plank out of their reach and pushing their dead mother’s ashes on their heads.

But whatever gameplay is spoiled, Stray remains a slave to the contextual button prompt. And sometimes it plays a naughty prank because it trained you to always press the button prompts, but every now and then you find one that just makes the cat curl up and go to sleep. That is as annoying as it is completely proprietary. I think it’s for people who want to do the self-imposed narcolepsy challenge. Come to think of it, the lack of a strong core gameplay means that there are quite a few things you do just for the sake of self, like the sidequests in the open pieces. There’s one where you have to find hidden song pages for a busker, but there’s nothing the game can do to reward us for doing it. There’s no RPG system where we can put experience points into our sassiness of adorability stats, so all you really get is the chance to hear some snatches of shitty chiptune music that I could have gotten at home through my sticking your head in a box of cell phones from the early 2000s. Yahtz, what are you talking about? Why would a cat game have RPG elements? Imagine yourself holding the hilt of the breaking sword between your cute toe beans? Thanks for awkwardly swinging in the general direction of my next point, viewer.

See, as the game opens up in a quest town and fights the oppressive regime at sea, I get the feeling that our status as cats is increasingly at odds with where the story is trying to take us. I don’t know what these friendly robots see when they notice me and ask me to collect three cans of Red Bull, but apparently it’s not a goddamn cat with no opposable thumbs and a blank look on its face. Reminds me of the time I came home from wisdom tooth surgery and was found crying in the yard because the squirrels wouldn’t light me up. So it gets even crazier when we bring him the red bull cans. There’s a whole thread in the second half of the game where we join the brave resistance against the oppressive regime and when we show up at our rebel contact’s house they all say, “Aha, you must be our new recruit, prepare for your dedication to the cause!” instead of “Why did this stray cat walk into my house? Get the fuck away from the curtains.” It makes me feel like the main character could be anything at this point. A squirrel. A roomba. A bottle of HP sauce carried on the back of a very ambitious ant.

I don’t even know if this is a point against the game. I think it’s pretty funny. And it can play the whole theme where the robots imitate human behavior without fully understanding it, but towards the end the plot tries to have powerful emotional moments that don’t really work with a cat. Like, a character pushes you through a door and says, “I’ll stop them! All the resistance’s hopes are now with you!” and then we go to the cat reaction and it just looks stunned because it’s a fucking cat and it probably would have betrayed the whole cause for a tummy rub this also affects the emotional reward of the end – WOO WOO SPOILERS BEYOND THIS POINT STOP LOOKING OR LEAVE YOUR RIGHT TO CALL ME A COCK – when your droney wone sacrifices itself so that you alone can escape I mean the drone was the conscious one and the cat was exactly what it drove around it is like sacrificing yourself for your goddamn wheelchair I think it freed the robots too, but the drone still delivers a heartfelt deathbed speech bouncing right off your stupid gormless cat face like a misdirected frisbee And then in the final shot for the At the end of the credits, the cat looks back over his shoulder as if to say, “What the hell was that about? Why was my squeaky toy trying to have a moment?’