Stray Review: A Frivolous Cat Simulator Where the Cat Is Almost Beside the Point

Play as a cat in the ruins of a post-human civilization. That’s the delightful promise of BlueTwelve Studio’s Stray, and the game delivers on it across its joyous and mysterious opening chapters. Your cat protagonist has to make its way through an overgrown industrial area alongside its feline friends, jumping over corrugated fences and between steel girders. And when an old pipe gives way, separating your cat from its peers and trapping it inside a walled, neon-dappled robot city, you have to figure out how to navigate and interact with air conditioning units, exposed pipes, scaffolding, and more in order to escape.

Enter B-12, your tiny drone companion for much of the rest of the game, and suddenly you’re relegated to sidekick duty. Indeed, the longer that Stray goes on, the more your cat begins to feel like a vehicle, both literally and figuratively, as B-12 pops itself in a little vest that you wear and tasks you with recovering its lost memories. There’s no way to know if your orange cat thinks about its separated brethren, or if it feels anything toward B-12 or the other robots of the world, and the gameplay suffers from this detachment, growing increasingly formulaic and derivative as the more familiar and human elements of B-12’s quest take over.

That isn’t to say that players need to be privy to the cat’s thoughts; in fact, it helps that while the game translates robot-speak to the cat, it doesn’t give the feline an actual voice (beyond a dedicated “meow” button). Even at its most detail-rich—namely the stretches set within the Slums—the game doesn’t invite us to ever really understand its silent protagonist. As such, it becomes difficult to not see the critter as a means of tricking cat aficionados into playing what’s essentially a reskinned and heavy-handed Ico-like adventure game.

It’s too easy to forget that you’re playing as a cat. Sure, there are moments of feline verisimilitude where you can rub up against a robot for comfort, scratch a post, or curl up and take a nap, but these are entirely optional—a little bit of catnip dropped at our paws and leading to an achievement at the end. Movement aside, the bulk of the required gameplay involves B-12’s non-catlike behavior of operating keypads, solving puzzles by choosing the right item from its inventory, and, at one point, using a gun to kill the skittering, cat-eating Zurk blobs that lurk in the sewers. Any illusion of being a cat collapses in such scenarios.

Stray is most fun when you allow yourself to, well, stray from its narrative path and simply savor the level of detail that went into rendering its cyberpunk environments. That’s most evident during those fetch quests sprinkled throughout the campaign that rely entirely on your cat’s actions. The game wondrously captures the smooth and intuitive ways that a cat moves, and, for better and worse, it’s never less than inviting to all players, as a single press of a button completes a jump, thus ensuring that the platforming is entirely stress-free.

Consider, then, your aimless exploration a happy reprieve to the game’s big, linear, and telegraphed moments that sometimes make it difficult to shake off that B-12 is by and large the one pulling the strings. The game thrives in unexplained lore, like the Grandma robot that knits warm clothes for her neighbors and the bots that go clubbing and somehow get intoxicated. At its best, Stray encourages us to explore at our own leisure, to squeeze through narrow vents or jump through windows and run up and down exposed ventilation ducts, all so that we may accidentally stumble upon such scenes of lovingly rendered robot life.

“I’ll hack the machine and you’ll destroy some stuff,” says B-12 at one point in the final act. With that line, the game unintentionally reveals what it thinks of its cat protagonist. Despite being flesh and blood, the cat never needs food, water, or sleep; never hisses in anger at having to undertake a task; never bristles at the sight of a Zurk horde, at least not outside of one cutscene; and, aside from a few seconds of slower-than-usual animation, never seems injured by any major falls. Which is to say that if Stray had made even more room for moments that were alive to what it’s like to be a cat but also feel as one, then it might not have left us with the nagging feeling that the critter at its center is a calculated means to an end.

This game was reviewed with a copy purchased by the reviewer.