Stray has a refreshingly hopeful view of the end of the world

destructoid.com:

This feature contains massive spoilers for the entirety of Stray. Do yourself a favor and go play it before you read this.

The second I saw the announcement trailer for Stray, I knew it was a game I was going to play on release day, no questions asked. I am a cat mom, after all, so anything with a cat, let alone as a playable character, is a big win in my book. While it was pretty easy to get me on board with the premise of Stray alone, one thing I wasn’t expecting was just how rich and compelling the story was going to be in this game. I mean, it was published by Annapurna so that should have been my first clue, but even so, it slipped my mind.

To start, the worldbuilding was incredibly detailed and made talking to NPCs, a pretty important mechanic when you’re trying to gather information for your quest, a fun and surprising part of the game. It’s the details that really got me, like the robot laying on the roof in the Slums looking up at the “stars” that are actually just lights on the roof of the city, or the robot in Midtown who was sitting reading a book and philosophizing about the “metaphor” of the Outside, or the grim detail that robots in jail can have their entire memories wiped so that they’re left as the perfect model citizen.

A vast majority of the NPCs had their own little stories, not just in what they were physically doing, but in what they thought of the city they live in and how they cope with being stuck there. We have a clear throughline with the cat and B-12 having their own narratives respectively, but most of what we learn about the state of the world and the underground city comes from NPCs giving us glimpses into their lives and inside their heads.

While the whole story of how the city met its