Welcome to our review of Stray, a game that has been applauded for being so great and I agree wholeheartedly.

Lost, alone and separated from family, a stray cat must untangle an ancient mystery to escape a long-forgotten city. Stray is a third-person cat adventure game set amidst the detailed, neon-lit alleys of a decaying cybercity and the murky environments of its seedy underbelly. Roam surroundings high and low, defend against unforeseen threats and solve the mysteries of this unwelcoming place inhabited by curious droids and dangerous creatures.

 

See the world through the eyes of a cat and interact with the environment in playful ways. Be stealthy, nimble, silly, and sometimes as annoying as possible with the strange inhabitants of this mysterious world. Along the way, the cat befriends a small flying drone, known only as B-12. With the help of this newfound companion, the duo must find a way out. Stray is developed by BlueTwelve Studio, a small team from the south of France mostly made up of cats and a handful of humans.

Stray is a perfect game because it has cats in it. Thank you for reading, good night, and do not forget your coats on the way out. No seriously, I love cats, I got 4 pedigreed cats and their Instagram @nevazhenya is relatively popular even though I barely post any pictures on it, basically just when they have a cute pose or do something funny.

In the game however, aside from purposely scratching your nails or asking one of the robot inhabitants for pets, this is actually quite a serious endeavor. From the start, you are on a real journey to find out where your pack is. Well, you basically just fell down from the outside into what is a maze filled with robots and appears to be a long-forgotten city. You are to befriend some and enlist the help of a little drone called B-12. As you start exploring, you slowly but surely work your way to the top of this city you are in.

Escaping from those weird enemies at first, destroying them as soon as you have a weapon. Getting trapped, and escaping from enforcer bots, this game has it all. All while this is really just one big puzzle in the grand scheme of this game. Kind of like you are playing cat parkour, the way a cat would do it, but you control the cat.

Now not all is sunshine and roses, I do feel like the game could have maybe benefited from a map maybe in one of the small towns/enclaves you visit. It is like they are so small, that you really don’t need them, but it would have been something that I could have wanted. Like filling in the map when you visit a place, similar to how the map worked in Dragon Quest Builders 2, it only gets discovered when you have been there. But this is more a desire out of convenience, it would have allowed me to probably dig deeper into the places and see what I may have missed.

And at the same time, this is also why I loved this game so much. I just felt like discovering the entire time. I wanted to see every nook, every cranny and what not. Even the end of the game, sadly is just a 5 hour game with normal investment of time into discovery. I could easily want a version that is a 100+ hours of this game, I was that much into it. Oh and that ending, so great! It really brought the story of our stray cat to a perfect ending.

In conclusion, Stray is so fun and immersive, you forget about all the bad points and just keep going and going and going. Damn, this game is so great and that ending, I want to play it again just to experience it again already.

10/10

Tested on Playstation 5