Walls and carpets can be scratched at, knees can be lovingly rubbed against, objects can be heartlessly pushed off shelves, and there’s a dedicated meow button that I rarely stopped pressing. Your feline form brings a lovely and lighthearted flavor to this otherwise dark world, and there are moments all throughout that encourage you to set aside your responsibilities and simply play. See the world through the eyes of a cat and interact with the environment in playful ways.Īt the same time, Stray revels in the fact that it has made you a cat.
These interactions are full of recognisable details-the way ears flick and rotate, the stretch routines-and if you like cats (as I do), Stray should have you at “meow”. As the game opens, your gang waits out a storm in a concrete shelter, where you can instigate a little play fighting or mutual sniffing and smearing. The slender ginger tabby is one of a small feline colony living in a disused industrial district long since reclaimed by nature. The feel of your moggy is crucial here, and it’s instantly evident how much observational work has gone into her animation. JOJO’S BIZARRE ADVENTURE: ALL-STAR BATTLE Stray simply makes such activities more natural, giving us the perfect form for the job. Particularly in platform-puzzlers like this, our first inclination is to explore, looking for unorthodox routes up the sides of buildings, say, or jumping on furniture and seeing which objects we can manipulate.
The early novelty of playing as a cat in Stray soon gives way to a striking realisation-we often behave like cats in games anyway. The robotic denizens of this cyberpunk world generally talk to you like they would anybody else, and the only way it’s ever really relevant to the story or the action is because you can fit into tight spaces they can’t.
The simplicity of that concept works wonderfully, especially because the fact that you are a cat doesn’t actually matter all that much to the artificial people you interact with or the things you are asked to do.
To be clear: you’re not a magic cat, not a mutated sci-fi cat, not some kind of sentient super cat – just a normal, cute cat, albeit one that displays the sort of intelligent awareness we all like to pretend our own cats do when we aren’t looking.
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