Games like Stray and Endling are creating more realistic animals
While an ominous blood moon hangs in the sky, four cats take shelter from torrential rain. In Stray, released this week for PlayStation consoles and PC, you play as one of these animals. A push of the left analog stick causes your cat to ease into a lilting trot; holding the right trigger makes them accelerate into a bound; then, at certain moments, you press a button to interact with your nearby feline friends. You play fight, nose rub, and curl up to them, each action beautifully animated, soundtracked with delightful purrs and trills.
By coincidence, Stray was released on the very same day as Endling: Extinction Is Forever, another game that casts you as a virtual animal: a fox in a world ravaged by environmental disaster. Where Endling is a straightforward eco-fable, Stray is a philosophical cyber-adventure. Together, these games do more than speak to our memefied affection for virtual critters; they let us ask questions through their virtual protagonists while asking questions of ourselves. In Stray’s case, the cat’s very form — a digital / electronic being posing as a biological / organic creature — feeds into the game’s subtext. Developer BlueTwelve explores the all-too rigid division we impose on nature and technology, the blurry line between artificial and natural intelligence. It’s a credit to the game’s artists, animators, and sound designers that the constituent parts of this animal coalesce into such a persuasive whole. We’re a long way off the low poly animals of yesteryear.
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Indeed, as I write this, Twitter is awash with videos of cats glued to television screens as their owners play Stray (there’s even an account dedicated to it). Their ears rotate with each chirp; their eyes track the
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