Stray Hands On Impressions

Mode: Single-player video game

Developer: BlueTwelve Studio

Publisher: Annapurna Interactive

Engine: Unreal

Genres: Adventure, Indie, Platformer, Puzzle

Platforms: PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Microsoft Windows

Cat owners rejoice! Stray is here. This article is going to cover my hands on playthrough of the first four chapters ending in The Slums. Stray starts off with a super peaceful cutscene with the Cat and it’s cat buddies just hanging around Inside The Wall (Chapter 1). Gameplay starts off slowly with basic tutorial sequences controlling the hero Cat protagonist through jumping, climbing, meowing and scratching a tree.

Controls for the most part are solid and snappy. You can see an X where you can and can’t jump. The camera zooms in too close to the cat on occasion which bugs the shit out of me. The Cat’s animations are top notch. If you ever watched a cats movement and behavior this game nails it’s animations.

Getting back to the beginning of Stray. You the Cat gets separated from your cat friends taking a bad fall down into the Dead City (Chapter 2). The Dead City has a dark dystopian cyberpunk aesthetic. Neon soaked dark alleys, and that rain soaked look etc. As the Cat you meet your drone companion “B-12” by solving a puzzle inside The Flat (Chapter 3). B-12 can open doors as well communicate with “living” robots. He can open safes as well. Puzzles so far have been easy and straight forward pretty much. When you reach The Slums (Chapter 4) the game starts to open up into a city hub area you can explore and talk to many robot denizens.

The Slums is currently where my playthrough for today ended. You meet an Outsider robot named MOMO who is willing to help the cat and B-12 reach the surface. But first, you guessed it! He needs a favor to fix a transceiver. The Cat and B-12 must collect 3/3 notebooks in The Slums all of them located on rooftops. Traversing and platforming in Stray is pure fun. The city is beautiful with stellar visuals running on Playstation 5. Technically I see allot of clipping into walls but who cares. I don’t!

Gameplay so far consists of avoiding the only other organic beings besides cats called Zurks. Zurks eat everything pretty much. Even the robots are terrified of Zurks who look like Halo’s Flood. You can run away from Zurks and press O to shake them off the Cat. If you don’t, the Cat dies. I haven’t experienced any true combat sequences yet. Majority of gameplay is relaxing.

As the Cat you can interact with almost everything. I even tripped a robot flat on his face while he was walking to a trash dumpster. You can drop paint cans on robots, put a paperbag on Cat’s head, drink water, scratch posts just to name a few. You can also interact with objects like radios, keyboards, pick up and carry objects, knock over small objects like bottles. You can meow to distract robots. One time I made a robot spill a can of paint by meowing near him multiple times.

The music and sound design is good so far. You have chilling melodies with synth-music sprinkled in adding to Stray’s cyberpunk world’s atmosphere. I’m impressed by Stray’s overall world presentation, it’s really solid from a production standpoint. If this game had voiced dialogue I would think it was a first party level type game. It seems Stray snuck up on me with it’s quality as I wasn’t expecting much.

I was like “oh a cat game, cute”. After spending time with this game now I’m a believer. The story is told like a Souls game where it’s not in your face but subtly with collectibles and items. You learn the story of Stray through the world by viewing collectibles (Remembering Memories). These Memories can be anything like food, posters and graffiti. You see these while exploring the world.

I like finding the collectibles in Stray. Usually I hate collectibles in videogames but these tell the story as to what happened on Earth to the humans. Remember, no humans in this game. I can write much more about Stray but I need material for the written review later. I am also adding upwards of thirty gameplay videos a day of Stray HERE. With that said thanks for reading – Jason