There are characters to befriend and items to collect. But there's one key difference between stray and its contemporaries: you play as a cat. This may sound like a bit of a twist or even a gimmick, but actually the shift in perspective makes stray feel refreshingly new. You're still in a big, complex world, but now you're seeing it from ground level. It changes everything from exploration to puzzles. And coupled with a bittersweet story that oscillates between joy, heartbreak, and occasional horror, it's one of the best games of the year so far.
In stray, you play as a nameless cat who at the beginning of the game finds himself separated from his feline friends and plunges into an underground world where robots live instead of humans. At first, the goal is simple: get back to the surface. However, the search quickly becomes something more. Eventually, a cute drone named B12 joins you and the mysteries of the world begin to pile up. On your way to the surface, you climb the layers of robot society – literally – to learn more about not only their lives and history, but also what the hell happened to the humans. Plus, there are the Turks, a mysterious swarm of bug-like monsters that eat seemingly anything. This includes robots, which is what keeps the machines confined to various underground slums, as well as cute cats.
The story also provides a nice twist on the classic silent protagonist. Unlike, say, Link from The Legend of Zelda, it makes sense here that your hero never speaks because he's a cat. You can occasionally communicate via translation from your drone buddy, but more often than not, Stray is a game where your actions do the talking. You can pander to the robots by doing small and big favors – these can range from helping a robo-grandmother knit a cozy poncho out of electrical cables or bringing a father and son together by navigating dangerous sewers full of goblins. Stray's story is relatively short - I finished the game in about seven hours - but it covers a lot in the run, with topics ranging from wealth inequality to environmental disaster, not to mention the all-too-important fate of the cat itself.
As for how it plays, Stray moves between several genres, depending on the moment. Most of your time in the beginning is spent figuring out how to navigate a very vertical city as a little cat. The controls are a little different from a typical third-person adventure: while you can move around freely, the jump button is contextual, so you can only jump when an X appears on a ledge. It took me a while to get used to it - and it can slow you down when your life is on the line during an action sequence – but it also makes a lot of sense. In Stray, movement is often a constant process of planning as you chart a course up or down a building or treacherous path. It's akin to watching a house cat methodically climb furniture and countertops to get to the refrigerator.
Traveling involves not only planning the right route, but also solving some generally easy-to-deduce environmental puzzles. These could be as simple as knocking down a plank of wood to create a bridge, but are often more complex steps that can require anything from repairing machines to scaring robots with well-placed meows. (There's a button on the controller dedicated solely to meowing.) This isn't a straightforward action game where you have a lot of abilities at your disposal. You don't have a weapon outside a short part of the game, so all you can really do is run, jump, meow, and perform other context-sensitive actions like scratching at doors or hitting something off a shelf. The experience is more about exploring this densely populated world, looking for clues and figuring out the best way to proceed given your limited kitten abilities. And while some of these actions exist in other games, the sheer fact that you're a cat with limited options and a mundane outlook makes them very different in practice.
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