Stray and the breezy appeal of less is more game design
NB: This article includes very minor Stray spoilers
Stray, a whimsical little morsel of a video game about doing Cat Things in the far flung future, has reportedly become the best user-rated Steam game of 2022 (so far). The title currently has an overwhelmingly positive rating on the platform with over 43,000 user reviews, suggesting the Aristocats were bang on the money when they made the rather spurious assertion that everybody wants to be a cat.
Of course, it's worth noting that despite being the brainchild of relative unknown BlueTwelve Studio, Stray did have the might of darling "indie" publisher Annapurna Interactive behind it. But still -- near-universal adulation in the games industry is that rarest of things, and after spending a few evenings leaping through Stray's quietly hopeful post-human world I'm convinced the title's minimalist, laser-focused approached to game design was absolutely key in helping this particular cat get the cream.
I also concede that having a dedicated 'meow' button probably helped.
Although most of the folks who've played Stray -- on Steam, at least -- seem to be pretty smitten with the title, some Reddit users on r/games have been struggling to parse the hype. During one of my (all too regular) post-midnight Reddit dives I stumbled across a thread laden with folks for whom the sheer amount of praise being heaped upon a video game that's just "one step above a walking simulator" was incomprehensible verging on insulting.
Some of the more sarcastic commenters seemed to suggest that players must have alarmingly low expectations if an experience in which "a cat climbs stuff for 3 hours" was deemed worthy of song. I'm not trying to legitimize those reductionist remarks. This is the internet,
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