Stray

Be a little kitty and grapple with the nature of consciousness

The star of the game, the little orange cat. Image credit: BlueTwelve Studio/Annapurna Interactive

Everyone has something that will affect them emotionally more than other things. For many parents, that thing will be children, or parent-child relationships (which I think is part of why The Last of Us plucked so many heartstrings), for other people it will be situations or events. If you want to get an emotional reaction out of me, separate some friends or put an animal in some peril. So, naturally, Stray occupies a very special place in my heart.

Stray is almost too good at eliciting an emotional reaction at the start and at the end of the game – there are two particular moments that make me cry with a 100% guarantee, though I won’t talk about the one at the end, for fear that you might not yet have played it. Most of you will know at the very least that Stray is the cat game. You are a little orange cat with black tufts and stripes, kinda like a tiny tiger, with a pink nose and toes. The game has a dedicated button to meow, which I pressed constantly (sometimes to my detriment as there are occasional stealth sections) and joyfully. Well, your little cat has some cat friends, and the first few minutes of introduction and tutorial has you and your friends (is it a pack when it’s cats??) traversing a world that is clearly long abandoned. Suddenly, a pipe breaks and you slip, away from your friends and down into the dark, dank city. When you come to, you can hear the frantic cries of the other cats as you limp forward, your back leg clearly injured from the tumble. When I tell you that I sobbed, I am not exaggerating. I’m teary-eyed just thinking about it.

The game leads you around by your emotions as if they were they were reins. It is extremely effective in creating emotional connections through the game, even to characters we only spend short periods of time with. But B-12 is the robot buddy you meet at the beginning of the game and for me at least, I found myself becoming very attached to them. There’s a scene at one point in the game where B-12 realises that their family is long dead and they might be the only remaining human (they are a human’s consciousness uploaded to a cute little drone). This naturally weighs pretty heavily on them, and they retreat into themselves for a short period of time. B-12 is the medium through which you interact with the game. As a cat, you can’t understand what the Companions (the game’s robot inhabitants) are saying, you need B-12 to translate, and you need them to access your inventory (you’re a cat, you don’t have pockets). So your pal’s emotional distress has a direct impact on your ability to engage with the world, and I found this to be a clever device by which the game makes you feel extremely alien and extremely dependent on B-12. I don’t want to read too deeply into a very short section of the game, but it echoed a lot of familiar emotions I’ve experienced in my life, too. The way it can feel when someone you care deeply about is going through something and you are utterly incapable of helping – in Stray, it’s worse because you’re a cat and B-12 is a drone and you can’t provide a comforting hug when they might need it.

Ah yes, the screenshot every Stray player has taken. It’s adorable, sue me. Image credit: BlueTwelve Studio/Annapurna Interactive

I think on first look, many people would be inclined to describe Stray as a puzzle platformer, but I think it’s actually much more of a straight-up story-driven action-adventure game. You do do some platforming, but it’s not freeform at all, you can’t just leap to wherever you like. The developers have mapped out every “jumpable” surface in the game and you can only go where you’re allowed. There are rarely any puzzles to solve, and certainly no platforming puzzles – there’s usually just one direction to go, one ledge to get to next, then the next, and so on. I think this is fine, personally, but worth mentioning in case any of you haven’t played yet. For me, this didn’t detract from the experience at all – in fact, I think it was a deliberate decision made by the developers, because it allows them to more tightly control the camera angles through which you see certain sights, and it’s extremely worthwhile. I took approximately eleventy billion screenshots of Stray because there are so many moments that are composed like shots from a movie. The game is absolutely gorgeous. I could go on and on about how the environments are some of the best I’ve ever seen in a game and how the characters show an incredible amount of personality and emotion given that they are robots. I could go on about how unbearably cute the cat protagonist is and how beautifully rendered the plants are. It’s stunning. There are moments where you can direct the cat to curl up and go to sleep, and in a few of these the camera will slowly zoom out to show a huge shot of the environment and it’s so clever and they are so beautiful. Phenomenal.

I don't know how good Substack galleries are but I had too many screenshots.

I also utterly adore the way the game uses diegetic means of directing the player around, from signs with arrows on them to dark areas with a single point of light drawing you forward. There are no quest markers in Stray so you have to be able to navigate the world on its own merits, and you can. This is another part of it not being a puzzle game. It allows the developers to use these in-game methods, some subtle and some less so, to direct you around. It also means there doesn’t have to be yellow gamer paint on every surface you can jump on (though to be clear I am actually a pro-yellow-paint gamer in almost every case).

The cat feels so very cat-like, too. Curling up to sleep, tripping people up, leaving a trail of painty paw prints, knocking things off tables. The game absolutely delights in you performing these actions. When you shove your little head into a paper bag and get it stuck, the controls get inverted – a tiny but impactful touch. When B-12 puts a little backpack on you, the cat reacts exactly like my cat did when we put a little onesie on her to stop her over-grooming – she went absolutely stiff and still and just toppled over sideways as though paralyzed. I laughed out loud.

The city is bursting with life and personality. Image credit: BlueTwelve Studio/Annapurna Interactive

I might be about to get a little bit philosophy 101 on you here, and you’ll have to bear with me because it feels like I am the wrong person to be having and exploring these thoughts. I wish someone more educated was doing this but sadly, this is my blog and thus my task to write. I’ve picked the thread loose, someone else might be better placed to unwind the sweater, so to speak. Anyway, we try.

So in Stray, the player character is a cat. You direct the cat around and meow and scratch the carpet, and it’s lovely. You might get lulled into the natural next thought which is, I am interacting with the world as a cat, or like a cat would. However, I don’t think this is actually the case. We’re doing cat things, performing cat actions, but we are still people at the end of the day. I believe this is referred to as the mind-body problem and relates to the relationship between thought and consciousness, and I didn’t understand it very clearly. When I was looking around online to try and make these vague wisps of thought coalesce into a blog post, I found some stuff about a paper written in 1974 by philosopher Thomas Hagel called “What is it like to be a bat?”. I didn’t manage to read the paper itself but I read some summaries, and this quote on Wikipedia summarises it nicely: “Thomas Nagel argues that while a human might be able to imagine what it is like to be a bat by taking ‘the bat's point of view’, it would still be impossible ‘to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat.’” Interacting with the world as a human versus as a bat or (in the case of Stray) a cat, are completely different ballparks. They probably aren’t even both ballparks. We bring a human eye and a human’s understanding and experience of the world to our interactions, even if we are controlling a cat. And besides, even if you, dear reader, were able to truly embody the emotionality and consciousness of the cat in Stray, the developers who made the game were still humans (as far as we know) and are designing the cat’s interactions with the world through that lens.

Well, that’s all well and good, but what does it matter, I hear you cry. You’ll have to keep bearing with me for a little while but I am getting there, I promise. There are no humans in Stray, but there are the Companions. Originally created as simple cleaning robots, hundreds of years without humans have led them to try and fill the void left behind by them. The robots perform ritualistic, human-like behaviours, they water the plants and decorate their homes and have families. They are trying to interact with the world as though they themselves are human, but they run into the same problem that we do when we play the game as a cat. They are not and can never be humans because to be a human and to be a robot are fundamentally different experiences. Please don’t take this as me saying that I don’t deeply love the Companion robots just as much as I would were they humans instead. I am not dismissing or diminishing the very real emotions they clearly feel, the bonds they forge. A heart will appear on their facial display if you nuzzle up to them, and an angry face will take its place when you leap onto their game of mahjong, scattering the pieces.

But to be human, to be robot, and to be cat – these are different.

The Companions decorate their homes just like we do. Image credit: BlueTwelve Studios/Annapurna Interactive

In trying to imagine why any of that matters, the conclusion I reached is that the game wants its players to consider legacy and what that means and whether it matters. Even hundreds of years later the robots emulate and mourn the humans that were there before, despite the fact that the humans fled the city and sealed the Companions inside to fend for themselves. What do we leave behind us when we’re gone? I think these ideas all come together here – Stray is trying to imagine and depict a post-human future but through the lens of humanity.

That is until we get to the game’s “bad guys”, a highly evolved bacteria designed for eating rubbish. Zurks resemble head crabs with big, glowing yellow eyes, and they will straight-up murder you. As we descend into the areas more heavily infested, like the sewers, we start to see something truly post-human, something unimagined and alien, but unequivocally the baddies. I won’t spoil the surprise but believe me when I say that it is in sharp relief next to the neatly decorated homes of the Companions.

I don’t really have a good way to tie up those thoughts on the nature of consciousness and legacy. I certainly didn’t expect a 7-hour game where there’s a dedicated meow button to stir up such complex thoughts. It’s truly one of the most beautiful things about video games to me, their ability to convey such complex and challenging ideas and themes through something so cute and fun.

I truly think everyone should play Stray. It made me cry, it made me laugh. It made me think. There is fairly conclusive evidence that it ends extremely hopefully (this short YouTube video explains why it’s likely the orange cat was reunited with its pack). The nature of how we engage with the world, and the nature of legacy and a post-human world are topics worth thinking about. Or just lay on a pillow and hammer the meow button. Get you a game that can do both.

• Game: Stray

• Developer: BlueTwelve Studios

• Publisher: Annapurna Interactive

• Platforms: PC, PlayStation 4/5, Xbox One/Series X|S, Nintendo Switch (coming later this year)

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