When the trailers for Stray first dropped, I was enamoured by the adorable feline protagonist. The fact that the world had a futuristic cyberpunk vibe with robots had me sold despite the fact that I’m not as much of an animal lover as many other people on the internet are. Growing up, I’ve never owned a pet besides a rotating collection of goldfish that I never connected to and stopped looking after within a week.

In my defence, I was young and had hoped for a puppy. Comparatively, fish were boring and you couldn’t cuddle them. All they did was swim and swim and swim around a little aquarium and eating the fishy flakes that were dumped onto the surface. 

Hardly riveting.

As soon as Stray was released on the PlayStation and Steam, the internet fell in love. Streamers would gush over the cute cat and videos on YouTube now feature ‘cat experts’ reacting to the animations that Blue Twleve Studio have poured into the title.

For me, I was just interested in playing as something different than a human or anthropomorphic creature. Like many before it, Stray managed to capture the heart of playing a game as a quadruped. Walking around on all fours, leaping from one spot to the other and running at breakneck speeds…Better yet, it sprinkled what might have been tedious puzzles and platforming with fun ways of interaction like pawing at buckets, nuzzling robots and meowing.

Goodness, the outcry on the internet that there was a dedicated button for meowing was far bigger than I’d ever seen.

Still, as a mechanic within the game to attract the attention of the Zurks, it was fundamental for the way I traversed the Dead City and looked for a way to return to the Outside and my feline family.

From a story standpoint, Stray keeps it simple. Our unnamed protagonist is separated from the rest of its kind and falls into the Dead City, which has been closed off from the rest of the world. As the curious cat explores the remains of what came before, they find a lab and requested to help an artificial intelligence find a body that they can use. The AI installs itself into a drone and explains to the cat that it had previously helped a scientist but much of its memory has been recovered and would need time to recover. Though it doesn’t initially have a name, it settled for B-12.

Together, B-12 and the cat wend their way further into the city, encountering the robot inhabitants as well as the Zurk, mutant bacteria that had initially been created to eat the refuse and trash of the city. 

Over the course of their journey, players learn that the robots were once companions to the humans in the city. At some point, after the humans disappeared, the Companions became self-aware and might have developed souls. Humans, on the other hand, had succumbed to a mysterious plague and not a trace of them survive. Except, of course, in the way the Companions conduct themselves and the society they’ve built in the city.

Though the game began development in 2015, many of the themes explored ring true to our current state of affairs. Especially with the need to isolate and the still thriving pandemic. Even this careful blogger managed to catch the nefarious COVID-19 at the end of June. While my symptoms weren’t severe, it was an exceedingly stressful experience due to my fear of possibly developing long COVID. As of the writing, it appears my fears were unfounded but given the highly contagious nature of the virus, there’s no telling what a second, third or even fourth infection might cause to our fragile human forms.

At the end, when the cat and B-12 are on the cusp of finally opening up the city, the artificial intelligence’s last few memories are awoken. B-12 reveals that it was not just the assistant to an human scientist. Rather, they are the very conscious of the human scientist, now trapped in the body of a robot. Despite being the very last human, B-12 makes the ultimate sacrifice in order to re-open the dead city to the wider world outside the dome.

And yet, despite B-12′s exclamations, one of the theories I saw online spoke of the fact that most of the more human-like Companions were also very likely to have human consciousness transferred. Why then, would, many comment on the smell of paint or try to emulate human habits when robots have no need to ingest food and can’t physically feel warmth or cold?

Adding more fuel to the theory is the fact that one of the Outsiders, Doc, has a son. How can they feel familial relationships if they can’t reproduce?

Whatever the case may be, Stray was a fun little romp in the short few hours that I spent with it. Given the nature of the story and the world it created, there was no need for it an adventure that was tens or hundreds of hours long. In fact, for many, it’s their game of the year simply because ~everybody wants to be a cat~

On the other hand, there have been detractors that Stray is naught but a walking simulator.

For this blogger, the game might not be the most innovative game from the 2022 catalogue, but it, nevertheless, brought a smile to my face with its cat shenanigans whilst also terrifying me with its sewer monster. In short, there’s a little bit of everything for everyone in the game. The controls might not be complex and the gameplay might be simple but there are times when all a game needs it a good story and an excellent sleeping nook for one of the most endearing protagonists out there.