I recently finished playing Stray on the PS5. I accumulated a fair amount, but not all, of the game’s achievements over about seven hours of play. Stray is a moody, environmentally-rich platformer/puzzler where you play as a cat in a dystopian future. Spoilers follow.

I think the folks at BlueTwelve Studio may have underestimated just how much people just want to play as a cat. Not just in how many people reacted so enthusiastically to the game’s marketing, but in its gameplay. If they’d known, they never would have shipped with the “Show Cat Death” slider set to on, and they wouldn’t have spent so much time on running and shooting segments. Then you’d just be a cat with a drone buddy on a tour trying to reclaim its memories and collect badges for fetch quests and little optional puzzles.

If someone were to tell me that Stray was a showcase for the developers’ environmental design capabilities, I’d believe them. Every corner of every level had interesting and usually-unique stuff in it. The verticality of the dystopian slums that feels made for the cat, the dirt, the boxes, the books, the wires, the air conditioners… all of it was so wonderful. And so perfect to be explored from a camera positioned near a cat’s height off the floor. No corners cut here: the world invites scrutiny.

Now, corners felt cut a little in the character animation. It was an excellent choice to populate the world with robots: like how early Pixar went with toys because their tech could only really texture smooth things like plastic at the scale they needed, this made most loops and hitches in animation read as diagetic. The robots were just being robotic. Which I like. Very clever. But then when you press the dedicated meow button (there’s a dedicated meow button!) the cat doesn’t look like it’s meowing. It sounds like it is, but the animation is… not quite there. Like there was some amount of effort, but not enough.

And there’s not enough that I can do as a cat! Too much is scripted: you can only wind your way around the legs of a select few robots, you can only sleep in certain piles… and you can’t be held or pet? What’s with that?

Maybe the fault is mine: I was hoping to find in Stray a cat simulator. It has enough plot to exercise the setting and motivate us to move our cat through the stunningly-decorated (though oddly orientalistic) neon stacks. It has music to evoke and maintain a somber, contemplative mood. It has characters you want to help and you want to subvert. It lets you be sneaky and snarky.

But it also has a death mechanic. And a gun.

I dunno. I liked it. I liked being the cat, even when the game wanted to game instead of letting me be the cat. I liked knocking things over. I liked messing with robots for no reason. I liked jumping on air conditioners and signs and pipes and vending machines.

More games like this, please!

https://chuttenblog.wordpress.com/2023/10/13/so-ive-finished-stray-ps5/