Prior to its release, it was featured on most wishlists on Steam. And it does not disappoint. Stray, the new indie game for PC and PlayStation in which you take the place of a little ginger cat lost in a mysterious post-apocalyptic world populated by robots, is smart, beautiful and brilliant. Let’s dive.
The prologue of Stray broke our hearts. Accompanied by other felines, our little cat explores the remains of a city taken over by lush vegetation. But now, a few moments later, he falls into a precipice leading straight to the hollow of sewers filled with waste. Alone and separated from his buddies, our main character must find his way back to the surface.
You should know that in this futuristic universe, humanity is no longer annihilated by everything that already haunts us today: uncontrolled capitalism, global warming, pandemics. Humanoid robots animated by artificial intelligence took their place, surviving underground, isolated from the rest of the world. But there is hope: if one cat can survive outside, others can too.
Helped by robots aspiring to experience this outside world, it will be necessary to solve several mysteries to bring light to this city. But beware: Mutant critters lurk in the sewers, and they’re not afraid of furballs.
And Stray is above all a narrative game like Annapurna Interactive is used to offer us, its real strength lies in its frankly well thought out puzzles and in its vast levels of three-dimensional platformer designed by the team of BlueTwelve Studio, formed by former Ubisoft developers. In the space of a few minutes, we go from the role of the detective cat to that of the ninja cat.
There is something refreshing in discovering this nocturnal city largely inspired by the aesthetics of Hong Kong from a cat’s height: yes, we are small, but we are also agile. With disarming ease, we run through the streets, we climb on the air conditioners attached to the windows and we jump from one tin roof to another. And between two naps, we do our claws on the corner of the sofa.
As a cat lover, however, we suffered from the combat passages against the ferocious creatures mentioned above and those, later in the story, during which we must escape the gaze of aggressive police drones. Today, we feel almost nothing when our character dies in a video game. It’s quite another thing when our avatar is a little kitty, especially when animated with such stunning realism. But the game is still worth the candle. These passages are fortunately rare and brief, and they add to the tension: our robot friends are terrified by the outside, we have to give them a reason.
Completed in about 5 hours, 8 if you want to discover all the secrets that the game hides, you can only recommend Stray. For the story, for the design of levels frankly successful, and for this button on the controller which has only one function, to meow. We loved it.