Sci-fi game Stray delivers the ultimate fantasy: a cat who listens
There is a dedicated “meow” button in Stray, developer BlueTwelve Studio’s upcoming cyberpunk adventure starring a stray cat, and you can press it as many times as you want.
When playing as this unnamed orange kitty, you can be your most authentic and annoying cat self — or you can nap, pausing your adventure through a sci-fi city populated by machines, for an indeterminate amount of time. Just lay there, doing nothing, contributing nothing.
These actions (or inactions) highlight the developer’s commitment to cat authenticity in Stray, a game where players will experience a sort of power fantasy of laidback feline life.
The PlayStation and PC game’s developer appears to be exploring every aspect of moving through a world as a cat, from platforming — there’s a high amount of verticality in Stray’s level design — to communication with other characters. There’s the aforementioned meow button, but players can also claw at doors to get the attention of residents of apartment buildings and businesses. The cat can use its mouth to pick up small objects, like a bucket, or its paws to knock things off of ledges, as cats are wont to do. In one puzzle-solving sequence we saw during the demo, the cat knocked over paint cans from a roof ledge, smashing a glass enclosure and gaining access to a new area.
Not all of Stray’s cat behaviors are strictly gameplay-related; players can claw at rugs and couches, similar to how they would claw at doors, using alternating L2 and R2 trigger pulls on a PlayStation controller. Or they can knock over stacks of books or paint cans at their leisure, traipsing through the mess and leaving colorful paw prints through levels.
It seems that a lot of the appeal of Stray will be, simply, doing Cat Stuff.
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