Stray First Impressions

Good Morning Friends! Last night I set out with every intent to play through the new Guild Wars 2 Season 1 chapter 3 drop. However Stray, a game where you play a cat in a city filled with robots also dropped yesterday. What originally started out as my sitting down to play it “for a few minutes” wound up being the game I spent my entire evening in. Instead of talking about the story this morning, I am going to instead talk about the sort of game that it is. I am playing this on Steam because it is my platform of choice if I am given a choice at all. You are greeted by a message that this is best played with a gamepad, but if you are a keyboard and mouse aficionado you can safely ignore that. I’ve yet to encounter any sorts of movement that would be hard to pull off on the keyboard if you are not also very familiar with that control scheme.

Stray is firmly placed in the genre that is referred to as “Walking Simulators” where you are set in a world where most of your time you spend exploring, with little to no combat. The key difference is that instead of playing a human being, you are a cat, and your only interaction with the world is through batting things, meowing at things, or scratching on things. There are a number of games that I feel vie for the modern title of “Adventure” game, where you roam around looking for objects to interact with that you then use on other objects. Stray is very much in this same vein where as you progress through the game you will collect various bits and bobs and then will use those to either barter with robot companions for other bits and bobs, or unlock different things barring your progress.

I place this in the modern adventure game category because all of your interactions apart from freely being able to meow at will… are driven by prompts. On the keyboard, the most common prompts are Q for doing some sort of physical manipulation of an option and Spacebar for jumping, and if you can actually jump the spacebar icon will appear hovering slightly over the thing you are intending to jump towards. Most of the gameplay so far involves roaming around a rich urban decay setting and looking for things that can be interacted with. As you begin to reach objectives, the game does a really good job of somehow highlighting where you should be paying attention either with illuminated signs or yellow lighting effects. This is nowhere near as obvious as the yellow-painted rocks in some games… but if you know what you are looking for can be similarly effective.

In your travels, you encounter a drone that has lost its memory, and through interacting with various objects it can begin to remember things. It can seemingly understand you and ends up acting as your translator for both the world and the robot companions that you eventually encounter. This adds a new button to your repertoire which is E on the keyboard, allowing you to have the drone explain things to you or communicate on your behalf. Additionally, you can toggle on a flashlight mode which is helpful for exploring dark spaces. When not in use the drone docks on this nifty backpack that you get outfitted with. I am guessing the drone is also the person who is storing all of the things you pick up along the way because you sorta have to suspend your disbelief that a cat can easily carry some of the items you end up carrying.

While most of the game involves peaceful interaction, that is not to say everyone you will encounter will be your friend. There is an organic menace that has taken over the dead city, and there will be times when you need to avoid swarms of these critters. You can run and you can weave to avoid them, and if my theory is correct I am about to get some sort of device that will help me hold them at bay. However there is nothing that I would refer to as traditional combat, and it is a series of active puzzles that you need to solve. For example, you can meow to draw a swarm to a specific point, and then use your superior navigation skills and speed to distract them while you run to safety. Thankfully there are effectively “safe” areas and “dangerous” areas, so the moments you need to traverse one of these hot spots are clearly delineated.

The best moments of the game so far however have been in the interactions with the robot companions. They have seemingly outlived the humans they used to take care of and now do their best to honor the memories. This is a game where rich stories are being told through the scenery and very limited interactions, allowing you to read between the lines and flesh out the setting, and begin to understand small snippets of what happened to the world around you. For example one of the companions that you meet styles themselves as a musician, and as you find sheet music around the world you can bring it back and they will play the song for you. The game is filled with simple moments of joy like that, and if you are needing a bit more joy in your life then this might be a game for you.

I found myself enjoying the chill vibe of exploring the dead city, and honestly am probably going to mainline this game until I finish it. I’ve heard that the entire game is somewhere in the neighborhood of five or six hours in length. The experience of playing it though has been great for me personally. You all know I am a cat person and I would already die for this sweet baby.

[EDIT] – Character Death/Damage

So since this came up over on Twitter I am going to talk a bit about character death and this game. This is a sensitive topic given that you are playing a cat and we all love our pets. Essentially when you are in the danger sections it is possible for you to be overwhelmed by the critters that are chasing you. They attach to you and if you let them stay attached to you, the screen will fade to red and ask you to reset to a checkpoint. It is very non-graphic but it is assumed that your character dies, but the reset happens fast enough that for me at least it has less impact than dying in Mario bros. In the platforming portions, there is no way to leap to your death because jumps only happen if there is a specific trajectory you can jump to. It has been announced that the cat survives the story and is fine in the end, so again if you are worried about such things I think you will be fine. There is at least one moment in the story where the cat takes a hard fall as part of the story and limps around a bit but shakes it off quickly.