I had little trouble with any of Stray’s puzzles or challenges, but that might be because I grew up on a combination of 3D platformers and point-and-click adventures in the 1990s, and Stray is a blend of those two genres. Perhaps the least credible aspect of the whole setup is that a cat would actually be so helpful. Stray sounds like a shallow meme – it’s the cyberpunk cat game! – but the setting and the story have substance, and at the end I honestly found it quite moving. Accompanied by a drone, which acts as a translator between the robots, the cat and the player, we make our way through a city sealed off from the world, trying to make it to the outside, where we belong.
Post-apocalyptic narratives have been done to death lately, but this one feels interesting because we experience it from such an unusual point of view. Stray is an excellent example of how a change of perspective can enliven a fictional setting to which we’ve become habituated. I am a wild, mysterious, perfect thing in a broken world. The robots who have lived here on their own for untold decades have never seen anything like me before, but still, they feel compelled to pet me when I rub up against their spindly metal legs.
Rusty bucket menu windows#
But this time, I’m slinking around the fluorescent-lit slums of the future as a skinny wee ginger cat, scaling rusty pipes, squeezing through barely-open windows and pattering across corrugated-iron roofs. I have walked around decaying cyberpunk cities such as these many times before, with their omnipresent neon signage and filthy streets, their grimy verticality.
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