Stray, the ultimate cat adventure simulator from BlueTwelve Studio, has virally arrived on the scene. Soon after the game was released, countless videos and images of pets hyper-focused on the orange feline protagonist moving across OLED TV screens popped off on social media. While it’s safe to say Stray is a fast-paced, hyper-realistic experience for a house pet, what does it do for someone just looking for a fun game? Honestly, it does just enough to make for an enjoyable experience. Let’s get into it.
Stray is a simple and rather short single-player game where you play as a cat stuck in an underground civilization populated by robots. Your primary goal seems to be returning to the surface, but also, you’re a cat, so who knows what you really care about. Before continuing, I have a disclaimer: I do not and have not owned a cat. Some might say that this means I truly can’t appreciate what this game has to offer, but I’ll let you be the judge of that.
Overall, I thought the game was pretty enjoyable for a 4-5 hour experience. While I have some major criticisms that I’ll save for later, the pacing was its saving grace. No section of the game overstayed its welcome, and the chapters were different enough that the game continually felt fresh. This game was a series of well-polished parts that sang beautifully when brought together. The visuals, music, gameplay, and writing all did their part to get the job done, but some certainly did more heavy lifting than others.
I played on a 4K OLED on PS5, and I thought the game looked and felt great. No shade to BlueTwelve, but I was a little surprised to see how well the graphics turned out. The lighting, the environments, the robots, and of course the main cat protagonist all had a crisp and vivid look. It had that style that just draws you closer to the screen to pick up more detail. It was easy to immerse myself in the quiet vibe of the old robot city when the visual identity of neon signs, dirty streets, quaint homes, and sporadic shops sold me on it so well. Hell, I spent far too long trying to knock a mug into a trash can (only for the object physics to not even allow the mug to go in).
The fact that they nailed playing as a cat dead on only enhanced the experience. Scaling random objects, knocking stuff over for no reason, scratching up furniture, and meowing never felt so good. Causing some minor chaos added a sense of levity to this otherwise dramatic and sometimes bland adventure. I’m sure there were plenty of other details that avid cat fans can pick up on during their playthrough, but it was not lost on me that the team put a ton of love and care into the cat-centric gameplay.
I also don’t want to gloss over one of my favorite parts of this game, the music. Several times during my playthrough of Stray, I found myself bobbing my head to the beat of the soundtrack. It honestly felt like they made their own version of “Lo-Fi Beats to Play Stray to”. The sounds felt modern and appropriate for the tone the game was trying to hit. Sometimes we got mellow and serene tracks, while other times we got dramatic and climactic beats that mimicked the urban jungle we were dashing through.
On the surface, Stray is a beautiful showcase of what modern-day indie games can be, but when you claw at the game's exterior, you start to realize there’s nothing underneath. What you see is what you get, and that’s my biggest complaint with the game. Everything about Stray just felt very one-note.
From the very beginning, the story is rather predictable with very few twists and turns along the way. The game is a strong contender for the “tell instead of show” award at the end of the year. From start to finish, everything is laid out right in front of you using voiceless dialogue dumps from the robots. There aren’t really any mysteries to uncover, the characters don’t have multiple dimensions to explore, and even the gameplay can be navigated half asleep. Outside of playing as a cat, there weren’t many (if any) memorable moments that lasted with me after completing this game. It sounds weird to say this as a criticism, but it is very much just a video game. It has puzzles, it has areas to explore, it has collectibles, it has dialogue, and it has an ending. It checks all the boxes for things a video game should have, but forgets to add depth.
Throughout the game, I was longing for a reason to deeply care about what was going on. There were several moments where I thought the game would take a hard turn to an unexpected and more exciting path for the story, but instead, the moments passed by without skipping a beat. When the credits rolled, I just kind of sat on my couch with my controller in my hand and said, “Eh, I guess that was nice,” before immediately continuing with my life. I really wish they had either leaned into the wackiness of being a cat in the situation or fleshed out the more ominous parts of the story, like the crab enemies and the robot corporation that looms over the city; instead, we just got the most generic version of this story we could have possibly ended up with.
At the end of the day, I left Stray content but also disappointed. The game was included with PS Plus Extra, it was short, and it had some fun moments. The major moments in the game were fun enough, and there’s enough variability in those short 4 hours to stay engaged. For that, I would say it’s worth a try for anyone who may be interested. At the same time, I noticed so much squandered potential. After playing indie games like Little Nightmares, Inside, Abzu, and even Tunic from earlier this year which managed to really pitch a vision and a compelling story from start to finish, I can’t help but imagine the countless directions Stray could have gone in to have me thinking about the games days, weeks, months, or even years after I had played it. Stray gets a 7 from me.
