Stray’s 1990s Retrofuturism Makes Me Feel Old
Stray’s walled city is inspired by Kowloon City, a fortress in Hong Kong that was inhabited by over 30,000 people. At its peak, the city was known as ‘The City of Darkness’ in Cantonese because of its anarchic self-rule and its narrow, twisting alleyways that were in perpetual darkness, no matter the time of day. Kowloon City was eventually demolished in 1994, the same year I was born. It makes perfect sense, then, that Stray’s spaces are full of references to 1990s culture and fashion. The underground city is stuck in the past—the past that was my childhood.
Retrofuturism is an idea I tie to 1950s spaceships and hypersonic trains on rails covering the distance between London and New York in less than an hour. To me, it’s an idea of sleek greys and silvers, atomic power, and atompunk. Stray is a cyberpunk game, but that cyberpunk is not ‘50s holograms and flying cars, nor even ‘80s corporatism—it’s ‘90s bucket hats, lava lamps, and boomboxes. A retro-future. A space that is perpetually stuck in the stasis of CRT monitors and floppy discs. It inspires nostalgia, but it’s also a weird feeling. Big blocky monitors were once considered the peak of technology. I played my first game on one. Oh god.
RELATED: Stray Review - Bucket Hats, Puffer Jackets, And A Brilliant Cat
The fashionable denizens of The Slums and the Antvillage also look like a mix of Liam Gallagher gig attendees (bucket hats, a few wacky-looking parkas), 1950s bartenders (brown suits, braces), and French resistance fighters (berets, red sashes.) There are also cowboy hats, conical East Asian hats, puffer jackets, robes, hoodies, and a menagerie of other styles clearly drawn from popular culture. These items are sometimes mismatched—they are worn by sentient
Read more on thegamer.com
