Listen, I don’t care about cats at all. I’m a dog person. I just need you to understand that from the start.
Stray is a game where you play as a cat in some weird futuristic type of society where you interact with robots. You’ll eventually find a little robot buddy that helps you navigate the world and together you have to solve the mystery of what is happening to this world and eventually bring it into the light.
A lot of people around the release of this game were really hyped up about it. A lot of those people are cat people and it felt like they feel like a marginalized group and so they really had to hype up this game and boost it’s profile for some weird reason. Like, cat people are a bit insane I think we’re all finding out.
What is the oddest thing about this whole experience is that the game is basically an old school puzzle game. You have to explore your environment and figure out how to solve puzzles. Like, get an object for one robot that will allow you to do this other task across the map. Think of it as a modern Grim Fandango or something.
I was vibing with this game. It’s a beautifully styled world where the mystery in the story actually draws you in. Your main threat are these little eye creatures that will try to chase you down forcing you into these sequences where you have to dodge them as you run away. There’s a lot of really good atmosphere to the world, with levels ranging from very linear to more open objective large spaces. Those allow you to get a feel for the robots in this world and how they live, eventually providing more backstory to what is happening and how they got to where they are.
The whole puzzle aspect of the game is where it kind of lost me. I did lookup a guide and would reference it if the answers weren’t really presenting themselves to me in a timely fashion. I just wasn’t here for that and I don’t really feel like it negatively impacted my experience for looking these things up.
I got the platinum for the game, which was a decent experience. The hardest part of it all was this chase section where you can’t get caught by the little enemy creatures. It was a little annoying how many times you have to try that section and just through up a prayer to the luck gods. An interesting trophy was to speedrun the game and complete it in under 2 hours, which I did enjoy. I actually like these trophies on games that can be beat under two hours, I’m thinking about the recent Resident Evil games specifically.
Final Score – 8.0
A really enjoyable small game that came with one of my PlayStation subscriptions. It was good, but it did not make me a cat person, so you know it wasn’t great.
Ghost Ba Bomb 