Stray - Game Review

It seems almost silly to write a review of Stray, the debut game for French studio BlueTwelve, and arguably the flagship release for the Playstation Plus Etc subscription service.) The game has been covered excitedly since its trailer debut in 2020 (and for years before that in rumors & scattered screenshots).

Stray’s premise, playing a cat, wearing a cute little backpack, wandering around a city filled with kooky robots is tailor-made for both internet points and mainstream coverage. But such hypetrains have derailed before.

For, instance No Man’s Sky went from The Tonight Show feature to a Wish.com Jurassic Park knock-off. Cyberpunk 2077 proved that CD Projekt’s inability to code vehicles wasn’t limited to Roach.

Stray largely avoids pitfalls by sticking close to its central premise (sometimes to its detriment) and by being a solidly charming game.

Stray’s premise, playing a cat, wearing a cute little backpack, wandering around a city filled
with kooky robots is tailor-made for both internet points and mainstream coverage

The Adventures Of Milo And GlaDOS
Actor and alcohol enthusiast WC Fields famously said “never work with children or animals”, and yet some of the most effective stories in video games feature one or both. The Last Of Us and God Of War are basically afterschool-care-with-axes simulators, and who hasn’t tearfully reloaded after Dogmeat caught the wrong end of a super-mutant?

Stray switches up the formula by dropping the parent (be it blood, step- or pet-) and putting you directly in control of the title creature, an orange cat voiced by newcomer Lala. Soon after falling into the bowels of Walled City 99, you rescue B-12, a flying droid plagued with amnesia and near-cat-like cuteness.

And while a third-person game already puts distance between the players and the on-screen characters, the two main characters are so different visually from players that even direct control doesn’t overcome the feeling that you are escorting these two lost souls around rather than embodying them. The brilliant move of keeping the perspective to cat’s eye level reinforces this separation, which in turn serves to build empathy toward the two, not like that’s hard with their squishy faces and blinky eyes and…

Sorry, where was I?

Soon after falling into the bowels of Walled City 99, you rescue B-12,
a flying droid plagued with amnesia and near-cat-like cuteness.

Robo-boogie (The humans are dead)
The Cat (which is like The Dude but furrier) and B-12 are searching for a way out of Walled City 99, a massive sealed bunker populated by the abandoned Companion robots long after the humans they served have vanished. There are allusions to environmental collapse and/or a plague being the cause, but they do not figure into the story in any great way beyond the personal connections to B-12.

In humanity’s stead, the Companions have tried their darndest to take over for the humans, donning clothes, performing social functions, even taking jobs.

The robot characters, particularly the Outsiders who assist you the most in your quest, are cleverly written, with many of them having that unique quality of being unquestionably robotic in their logic while having a child-like innocence and lack of cynicism seen in other humanity-interested robots like Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation or Claptrap from the Borderlands series.

In humanity’s stead, the Companions have tried their darndest to take over for the humans,
donning clothes, performing social functions, even taking jobs.

The gameplay is roughly divided evenly between areas of exploration and object-based puzzle solving in the city areas and more perilous stretches filled with stealth, platforming and even rudimentary combat. There are several chase scenes where The Cat must escape from (and often through) hordes of the headcrab-like Zurks and while The Cat can be injured or even killed, mercifully there is no gore or pained squeals so the trauma is lessened somewhat.

The traversal both in the cities as well the wilds highlights feline agility as The Cat scampers across steam pipes, over I-beams and under railings, and the cities especially highlight a need to think in three dimensions as solutions and secrets are often found along balconies, under stairs and in hidden nooks.

In general if you can see it you can climb onto it, but unfortunately with freedom comes futziness. Too often in the platform-rich environments of Midtown or the zurk-filled walkways of the sewers, a slight shift in angle can cause an unplanned move onto the wrong awning or stop a 9th-life saving leap to safety altogether.

While this can serve to simulate the impression that many cat owners have as they watch their pets jump up and down randomly off furniture, it’s not quite as cute in practice.

The gameplay is roughly divided evenly between areas of exploration and object-based puzzle solving in the city areas
and more perilous stretches filled with stealth, platforming and even rudimentary combat.

Life Under The Dome
Stray is a quick game set in a slow world. It can be completed in under 2 hours (a more completionist pace still clocks in at under 10) but the world is designed to be enjoyed and savored.

Sit awhile and listen to the robo-busker as he noodles on his jerry-can guitar. Curl up on the bookshelf of an abandoned library and take a nap. Bat a ball around a living room while listening to the jukebox from the bar across the street. There’s even a trophy for sleeping for 1 real-time hour.

It’s clear that BlueTwelve wanted players to fully engage with the world they built, and appropriately that world feels alive…to a point. It doesn’t take terribly long before conversations repeat and walk cycles get predictable, but given the scope of the game this is the lightest of complaints.

By the time things begin to wear out their welcome you’ve likely got only a small handful of objectives before its onward and upwards. In a strange way, the overall tone of the game is similar to the SCUMM games LucasArts put out in the 1980s and 90s, in that while the characters are occasionally in peril and there are often clear good guys and bad. Also, the pacing is largely up to the player, the story is thoughtful and gentle and sometimes it's fun to take a break from puzzling and just see what happens when you go over there for a while. 

“…the pacing is largely up to the player, the story is thoughtful and gentle and sometimes
it's fun to take a break from puzzling and just see what happens when you go over there for a while.”

By the end of Stray, no great evil is defeated. No incredible truths are revealed. Even in a world filled with rampaging hordes of fleshy overgrown ticks, authoritarian police drones and robotic club DJs, the game is never larger or more important than the matter of a cat trying to get home and a drone trying to get whole. It feels like a pleasant dream, not completely devoid of spiky bits but not consumed by them either. It returns what you put into it and never asks for more than you are willing to give. Basically the opposite of a cat.

I give stray a 4/5 stars.