Stray's Guitar Robot Is The Heart And Soul Of The Cat Simulator
Stray is a beautiful game, and I particularly love The Slums. The relatively small area has been painstakingly designed so it not only feels like a real city – the first hurdle at which most games fall down – but also feels much bigger than it is. Part of this comes from the twisting alleyways and shortcuts that only cats could take, through ajar windows and across narrow walkways. More of that presence comes from the verticality, and the fact that traversing the rooftops feels like being in a whole new world compared to traipsing around on the floor.
Stray’s clever platforming would be meaningless, however, if there was nobody to make the underground city come alive. And with all the humans long gone, it comes down to the robots who inhabit this Kowloon-inspired city to bring it to life. Despite the fact that you’re the only living creature in The Slums, the robots have created a small society down there, and are living their best robot lives long after the humans that created them have perished.
Related: Stray Shows That Games Shouldn't Be So Obsessed With Combat
There’s a robot bar where a robot called Seamus is drowning his sorrows. There are houses, complete with hanging beads, beds, and TVs as though robots need any of those things. The robots themselves wear clothes, mimicking the humans that made them as a way of coping with their loss. Seamus dresses as Marty McFly and his dad, Doc, as (you guessed it) Doc, so they have some recognition of popular culture too. Or at least popular culture from a few decades ago. They celebrate a retrofuturistic ‘90s aesthetic, which is presumably when Stray’s humans first disappeared.
The fact that the robots have achieved sentience and try to mimic their human creators is a
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