Pop Culture is Allergic to Cats. Stray is the Antidote.

esquire.com:

Cats are usually portrayed as little demons or lazy, pretentious jerks. Annapurna Interactive’s latest game shows man’s (other) best friend in a softer light.

I never had a good experience with a cat. When I was a kid, all the cats in the neighborhood would come to my backyard to shit in our sandbox. In grade school, I saw my pit musician father play the musical Cats, and my mom took me backstage afterwards to meet the cast, but I was so terrified I nearly wet my pants. They looked like something out of a horror movie. And what’s more, I’m allergic to cats. We just weren’t meant to be.

So you would assume that I'd have the opposite of excitement when first hearing about Stray, a video game that's all about a cat who does, well, cat stuff. But a few years ago, I met a real-life cat named Nunzio. And everything changed.

It was when the Covid lockdown measures were first ordered. At the beginning of the pandemic, my then-girlfriend and I decided it would be safest to hunker down together, her and I–and Nunzio, who was like her son. It was my apartment or her’s, and I had the bigger TV. So she showed up at my door, litter box in one hand, suitcase in the other, and for the first time in my life, I had to live in the same home as a cat, allergies and all.

In the unforgettably surreal days of early lockdown, my future suddenly became very uncertain. Would we endure this pandemic? What would happen to the outside world? And could I survive in the same studio apartment as a cat? It all seemed terribly bleak. Stray has a similarly grim setup. You play as a nameless little red tabby, navigating a dystopian civilization, one that perhaps had been ruined by some kind of worldwide crisis–climate change, disease, nuclear upheaval, etc.