Stray game

Stray, from Annapurna Interactive, is a futuristic adventure game where players take on the role of a cat. It launches on July 19th for the PS4, PS5, ...

The first time the cat puts on its harness is one of the funniest moments I’ve experienced in a game. It’s a lot like watching a house cat methodically climb furniture and countertops to get to the top of a fridge. You move back and forth between these moments of action and adventure, and perhaps the most impressive thing about Stray is how it’s all paced. It felt more tedious than grueling, though these moments were rare, and the game has a very generous checkpoint system so that you are never forced to replay large sections. That said, there are a few action sequences, which, short as they can be, add a necessary dose of tension to the experience. Later on, the action shifts to stealth, as you have to completely avoid robots to infiltrate various places. In Stray, you play as a nameless cat that finds itself separated from its feline friends at the outset of the game and plunged into a subterranean world populated by robots instead of people. Outside of a brief section of the game, you don’t have a weapon, so all you can really do is run, jump, meow, and perform other context-sensitive actions like scratching a door or batting something off of a shelf. Stray’s story is relatively short — I finished the game in around seven hours — but it covers a lot in that runtime, with themes ranging from wealth inequality to environmental disaster, not to mention the all-too-important fate of the cat itself. Eventually you’re joined by a cute drone named B12, and the mysteries of the world start to pile up. You can pander to the robots by doing favors big and small — these can range from helping a robo-grandma knit a cozy poncho out of electrical cords or reuniting a father and son by traversing dangerous, zurk-filled sewers. That may sound like a small twist or even a gimmick, but in reality, the shift in perspective makes Stray feel refreshingly new.