A day in the life of a cat: The story of Stray
View(s):By Mahesh De Andrado
It’s raining outside. The weather is gloomy. You wake up and stretch your legs. You then go and check on the rest of your family and go about your work. The only plot twist here is that you’re a cat. This is how you, the player, is introduced to Stray. Developed by BlueTwelve Studio and published by Annapurna Interactive, Stray was released for PS4, PS5 and PC on the 19th of July 2022.
What is Stray about?
Put simply, Stray is a third-person adventure/explorer game, where you play as a cat. Said cat gets separated from their family during a morning jaunt through a city that is overgrown with grass and has a startling lack of humans and now must find their way back. As your journey as a cat begins, you get a mysterious call for help and you decide to check it out.
As you traverse across this seemingly empty world, you also find out that it is not in fact empty. Small creatures called Zurks lurk in the shadows waiting to attack unsuspecting victims, aka you. You can dodge zurks by sprinting and shaking them off. But you have to be really fast and shake them off. If they succeed in overpowering you, you die. Harsh, but also goes to show you that Zurks are dangerous.
Once you have escaped the zurks, you find yourself in an apartment with a laboratory. Being of cat mind and body, you proceed to knock things over and solve a few puzzles and you end up creating a physical body for the person who sent you the message. Said person turns out to be B-12 (a pun for the developers of the game BlueTwelve), a drone that previously helped a scientist but now has memory loss and requires some time to recover. B-12 also decides to accompany you on your journey. Throughout your travel, B-12 helps you translate the language of other characters and stores items you find along the way in a harness of sorts that you wear that acts as your inventory. You also find fragments of B-12’s memories, which give you a timeline of what happened to the world that you’re in.
You soon realize that the world is in fact completely devoid of human life. The only living things are Zurks and robots, some good, and some called Sentinels who attempt to shoot you if they spot you. As you progress in Stray, you get to use a tool called a Defluxor which is attached to B-12, which can be used to take out Zurks. The catch here is that it has a short usage time before it needs to cool down and recharge. Sentinels can be dodged by breaking their line of sight. Since you’re a cat, that shouldn’t be too difficult. As your story continues, you unlock more of B-12’s memories which in turn help you piece together what exactly happened in the world, and why it is the way it is. I won’t spoil the story for you and tell you what happens, but trust me, the build up of the story is definitely worth the amount of time you put into playing the game. The little side quests become a challenge to those who are used to seeing a list of objectives on screen (like me). So you really have to keep an eye on who and what you meet and connect the dots.
My experience as a cat
Stray opens up with me taking on the role of the protagonist cat. In true cat-like behavior, I meow, snuggle up to the other cats in my family and proceed to wait out the storm. Daylight comes and we rally together to explore the wilderness that is presumably New York city or a similar urban city. While exploring, I am required to jump onto a large metal pipe. This is where things go south as the rusty pipe can’t handle the sudden shift of weight from cats jumping on it, leading to the pipe breaking off and me falling down with it. I’m not going to lie, that moment scared me and I spent the next 5 minutes calming myself down and gingerly moving my character around to see if they were hurt.
When I saw they were not, I literally went “YAY” out loud, much to the amusement of my friend who was sitting next to me watching me play Stray. As I progressed along the game, it dawned on me just how much of detail BlueTwelve Studios had put into the game. I’m not talking about the graphics, although the graphics are pretty amazing too considering it’s an Indie title. I’m talking about the actual gameplay of being a cat. You can meow, you can scratch rugs, you can even knock things over with your paws in true cat-like fashion. If you find a nice cozy spot, you can settle down for a nap. If you see someone (in this case robots), you can rub up against their legs and see their little screen light up and it just warms my heart.
From the get go, it’s visible how much effort and detail went into the character models of all the cats. True enough there’s no real time ray-tracing or next-gen graphics, but the game is visually stunning to look at and I spent a considerable amount of time just running around looking at my surroundings, meowing, and taking naps (I have become one with the cats). Stray basically is a Cyberpunk-esque cat simulator with an engaging storyline and BlueTwelve has done a stellar job with it, paying a considerable amount of attention to detail and modeling real cat movements and behavior.
Stray is currently available on PS4, PS5 and Steam, priced at USD 29.99 for PS4 and PS5 and USD 11.99. If that is out of your budget, you can try playing it on one of your friend’s Steam accounts or console if they have the game. Alternatively, you can try getting it off a torrent site, but I wouldn’t recommend it if you don’t know what you’re doing. After all, since it’s an indie title, the best way to help them out is to buy the game. Trust me, if you’re a cat person, you will not regret playing Stray.
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