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This morning’s post is in part an addendum to yesterday’s post. My opinion on Stray is changing a bit as I get further into the game. Essentially the game seems to be a repeating pattern of miserable alien blob infested “endless runner” segments perforated by moments of exploring adorable robot settlements. I feel like on some level the alien segments are there only to be able to claim that the game has some skill-based gameplay when in reality the studio should have simply embraced the fact that it was a walking simulator. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the game would have been much better if I was just a cat roaming around a dead city talking to cute robot friends and never having to deal with these alien abominations.

In fact, I can outline the exact moment my opinion of this game started to shift. Light spoilers but The Slums is the first settlement that you spend time in, and during your travels, you find out that one of the robots has figured out a way to fight back and went out into the sewers to test this weapon never to return. So you go through a series of events to uncover this technology and when you have it… it is great. The weapon overheats so you have to carefully time your attacks but it works… you have some way of dealing with the alien swarm other than trying to run perfectly without getting captured. Then just as soon as you have the weapon… “story elements” take place and rob you of your only line of defense pushing you back into the “endless runner” territory. This feels so phenomenally bad and only serves to make the next sequence of awful alien-swarm-time feel all that much worse.

I talked briefly yesterday about the “red screen” where you get overwhelmed by the alien blobs and your cat lies down… and the game asks you to reload from a save point. Admittedly I was fine with this the first time I saw it after sorta learning the ropes of how to dodge the blobs. I was less fine with it the several deaths that I took trying to install a transceiver on top of a very tall, very blob-infested tower. Then all the deaths I took trying to get through the sewers… made me significantly not fine at all with it. I crossed that threshold from “it’s okay this is just a game” to “this is a sweet baby cat that I want to protect and I am failing”. This is the danger honestly of including cats or dogs in your games, because if you make our failure cause them to die… it hurts a lot.

So while my opinion yesterday was extremely good in this game, after more play I am starting to create some sort of risk versus reward matrix in my head. The gameplay of me roaming around a settlement and making robot friends is delightful, but at what point does that joy not outweigh the pain of watching a sweet cat die over and over. Granted like I said yesterday the death sequence is tasteful and not graphic… but just knowing that my cat is lying down because I failed them and that they are getting eaten alive… is not cool. Having to continue to confront the blob bullshit while simultaneously being robbed of the only defense I had… is not cool at all.

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.

Have you ever seen something and gotten really excited about it, even though you know it is highly likely to be deep in the “not for you” territory? Yeah, that happened to me this weekend with the Warframe TennoCon and the release of the Soulframe trailer. For some reason, there is something in my brain that devotes entirely too many resources to games that I do not understand why I do not enjoy. I guess on some level I keep hoping that they will click and in the case of both Path of Exile and Guild Wars 2, that has actually eventually (a decade later) paid off for me. Warframe is one of those games that I have tried numerous times and just cannot seem to get into even though I desperately want to. I see the way that Digital Extremes supports that game, and I am jealous… but want it to play like Destiny and not whatever space ninja mess that it actually is.

The first problem I have with Warframe is that there is some combination of things about the game that makes me horribly motion sick while playing it. I think it is this unique combination of the weird camera angle that you are forced into, the very tight FOV, and the reliance of the game on the bullet jump mechanic. Whatever the case playing this game for a long period of time, in the manner you should be playing it… aka very fast and run and gun… makes me physically ill. I’ve tried a bunch of things to get past this but have yet to find any combination of settings that seems to lower the nausea induction. The weird thing about this is that under normal circumstances I do not get motion sick. I can read in a car for hours without any ill effect, but there is some specific pattern this game is doing that triggers it in me… and I am not the only one.

Problem number two. I don’t love the art style. There is something about the whole bio-mech thing that I have never really liked. It started back in high school when I first encountered the Anime Guyver. There is just something needlessly baroque about it that bugs me. I really like clean lines and clear silhouettes and almost all of the designs save for Excalibur are overdeveloped. I mean I play a Titan in Destiny for a reason because it tends to look like an 80s mech. Robots are supposed to look like either Gundam or Robotech, and I struggle with engaging with the Warframe design ethic. Over the years it has grown on me, but not to the point of really appreciating it.

Problem number three. The design of Warframe tends to focus on missions often with timers and fail conditions. What I really want is something that is equivalent to Patrol mode in Destiny, where I can just drop in and make my own objectives as I go. I get that there are now “open world” areas in Warframe, but for whatever reason, they do not scratch the same itch. I’ve tried them and I still feel like I am playing through a structured mission… just one that is bigger. I think maybe over time I could get used to this because similarly in Diablo III I used to lean hard into doing bounties as my defacto activity, and now I spend almost all of my time in Greater Rifts… which are not dissimilar to the timed structured gameplay look of Warframe missions. I mostly have been looking for some low-pressure gameplay loop that I can use to level weapons and frames and learn how they play. I also really really hate the sneak-in and get some data missions because I want to go loud immediately.

So it is for all of these reasons that I am both interested and immediately concerned when I watch the Soulframe trailer. I see some of the same baroque design decisions in the armors chosen, but because it is more fantasy based… it feels like something I could enjoy. The movement hopefully is slower-paced and might not trigger motion sickness. It appears like it might be an open-world experience, so that is already angling towards the types of gameplay that I enjoy the most. However, everything about Warframe tells me that this is probably not going to be a game for me. So I am teetering on this edge of being interested but at the same time trying to keep my expectations in the basement. I really like Digital Extremes as a company, and I would love to have a game that is more tailored to my interests that they support because they really do a great job of supporting Warframe.

In the meantime, it does have me wanting to give Warframe yet another shot… in the many shots that I have given it over the years. It is a personal failing in me that I have trouble just writing a game off completely when so many people that I love and respect seem to enjoy it. Like I said earlier… this eventually paid off in both Guild Wars 2 and Path of Exile, but it was a long battle to get there.