Stray is a 2022 adventure game from BlueTwelve Studio, published by Annapurna Interactive, in which you play a cat. Not a cat-shaped hero, not a person in a cat suit. A cat, who falls into a walled city populated by robots, machines and mutant bacteria and sets out to get back to the surface with the help of a small drone named B-12. Development began in 2015, led by studio founders Koola and Viv, who wanted to make something of their own after working at Ubisoft. What they made is one of the most original games of its year.
Trailer, via GameTrailers.
Being the Cat
The game is played in third person, and the whole design is built around what a cat can and cannot do. You leap across platforms and climb obstacles. You knock things off ledges. You squeeze through gaps, scratch furniture, curl up and sleep. The animation is the achievement: the cat moves like a cat, and every player who has lived with one will recognize the way it hesitates before a jump and lands as if it never doubted itself.
The City
The walled city is a decaying neon slum built downward, and its robot inhabitants have taken up the habits of the people who are gone. They run shops, play music, worry about their neighbors. The cat is a visitor they mostly welcome, and the game’s warmth comes from those small encounters. It is a post-apocalyptic setting without a single human in it, and it is one of the kindest worlds in games.
B-12
The drone is the cat’s voice and hands. Using B-12, you store items found in the world and hack technology to solve puzzles, and the drone’s own story, revealed slowly, gives the game a spine the cat alone could not carry. The relationship between the animal and the machine is the emotional center, and it is handled with restraint.
The Zurks
The city is not safe. The Zurks, swarming creatures that want to eat you, and the Sentinels, machines that patrol the deeper levels, are the game’s threats, and the sequences where you run from them are tense precisely because a cat cannot fight. Evasion is the only option, and the game’s chase design makes that feel like the right constraint rather than a missing feature.
Where It Falls Short
It is short, and its puzzles are simple. The platforming is contextual, meaning the cat can only jump where the game allows, which keeps the animation perfect and the freedom limited. The chase sequences repeat their pattern. And the story, affecting as it is, resolves more neatly than its melancholy world seems to want.
The Verdict
Stray is a small, beautiful game with one idea executed almost flawlessly. It is available on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5 and PC, and it is worth an evening for anyone who has ever wondered what the cat was thinking.
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