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I don't feel like spending 30 minutes in MSPaint so here's the meme in text form
What I Played: Stray
What I Expected: Robot x Kitty - Friendship is Magic
What I Actually Got: Half-Life 2 x DOOM x NieR Automata x Metal Gear Solid x The Last Guardian x Blade Runner STARRING A CUTE AND HELPLESS CAT
To say this wasn't quite anything I was expecting would be putting it very lightly. I only knew going in that it was released in 2022 as a timed console exclusive on PS4/PS5 and it won a lot of awards including the Golden Joysticks 2022 PlayStation Game of the Year. Well, I knew it involved being a cat, and you had a robot buddy, but that was almost all I knew about it. So I had the pleasure of going into this game more or less completely blind
Stray is a game about being a cute ginger cat in a grimy neon-lit post-apocalyptic walled city where giant mutated bacteria obviously inspired by Half-Life 2's headcrabs and flying robots with guns try relentlessly to kill you. When not running from things trying to kill you, because duh you're a cat and have little or no ability to fight swarms of headcrabs and killer robots, you explore the ruins of the abandoned cyberpunk city and converse with a large number of friendly non-killer robots with your robot buddy who for some reason can translate machine speak to cat and somehow your cat is super sentient and can understand what robots are saying and what they want and what you need to do
What follows is a surprisingly amazing experience where you try to escape from this ruined dead city with your helpful robot buddy. Along the way, you find out what happened to civilization, the tale of your robot buddy, and also the other robots still living in the city. The story reminds me very much of the best works of Fumito Ueda (ICO, Shadow of the Colossus, The Last Guardian) and Yoko Taro (the NieR and Drakengard franchises), except well you're a cat. The game takes place entirely from the point of view of being a cat, which means you do a lot of cat things and you can explore areas in ways a large robot cannot because you're small, agile, and can run fast when the situation requires it. And yes, the situation will require it very frequently
Visually, the game is inspired by Blade Runner and the claustrophobic confines of Hong Kong's historical Kowloon Walled City and the hub areas are filled with an impressive amount of detail. The game uses the lighting system of Unreal Engine extremely effectively and even though it doesn't natively support HDR or utilize Ray Tracing, the combination of light and shadow with the detail in the decaying city environments and, uh, somewhat more nasty areas you must navigate through is pretty astonishing for a small indie game with a core development team of fewer than a dozen people. The team actually had help from Sony and Epic Games with development as this ended up being something of a high profile project for PlayStation Indies and ultimately took almost 7 years from its original conception as "HK Project" to release
I want to comment on the game's incredible soundtrack, which sounds a lot like both Half-Life 2's memorable soundtrack and also the NieR titles. The game's soundscape is filled with running or dripping water, running fans, music playing from jukeboxes, and then your cat suddenly needs to RUN LIKE HELL and the music just kicks in and the camera pulls back and it's a really dramatic experience. The sound designers really killed it with this game's audio, it's really really good. Also, your cat has a Meow button. I'm just saying
This game is about 8-10 hours long and never wears out it's welcome the whole time through. It's refreshing to play a nice short game which gets to the point, tells the story it's trying to, gets you through a couple of semi-open world hubs and several action and stealth set pieces, and then sends you on your way after a wonderful experience. I can see why this game got nominated for and won all the awards it ultimately did. This was an amazing little game which really was a lot bigger in scope than I could have expected. If there is such a thing as a "AAA Indie" title, Stray is it. It's at a level much higher than what you expect from any sort of Indie game, and quietly it's one of the best games I've played to finish out 2024
On PC I was able to play Stray at 4K/120 fps and it looked and ran great with no significant bugs besides my Dualsense controller occasionally just going haywire near the end and I'm not sure why but unplugging and plugging it back in fixed it the few times the issue cropped up. Oh right, if you hate shader compilation stutter, this game uses UE4 and has it and there's no option to pre-compile the shaders, fortunately this only happens when you travel to a new area and then it's smooth again
Final Rating: 9 Lives out of 10
What I Played: Stray
What I Expected: Robot x Kitty - Friendship is Magic
What I Actually Got: Half-Life 2 x DOOM x NieR Automata x Metal Gear Solid x The Last Guardian x Blade Runner STARRING A CUTE AND HELPLESS CAT
To say this wasn't quite anything I was expecting would be putting it very lightly. I only knew going in that it was released in 2022 as a timed console exclusive on PS4/PS5 and it won a lot of awards including the Golden Joysticks 2022 PlayStation Game of the Year. Well, I knew it involved being a cat, and you had a robot buddy, but that was almost all I knew about it. So I had the pleasure of going into this game more or less completely blind
Stray is a game about being a cute ginger cat in a grimy neon-lit post-apocalyptic walled city where giant mutated bacteria obviously inspired by Half-Life 2's headcrabs and flying robots with guns try relentlessly to kill you. When not running from things trying to kill you, because duh you're a cat and have little or no ability to fight swarms of headcrabs and killer robots, you explore the ruins of the abandoned cyberpunk city and converse with a large number of friendly non-killer robots with your robot buddy who for some reason can translate machine speak to cat and somehow your cat is super sentient and can understand what robots are saying and what they want and what you need to do
What follows is a surprisingly amazing experience where you try to escape from this ruined dead city with your helpful robot buddy. Along the way, you find out what happened to civilization, the tale of your robot buddy, and also the other robots still living in the city. The story reminds me very much of the best works of Fumito Ueda (ICO, Shadow of the Colossus, The Last Guardian) and Yoko Taro (the NieR and Drakengard franchises), except well you're a cat. The game takes place entirely from the point of view of being a cat, which means you do a lot of cat things and you can explore areas in ways a large robot cannot because you're small, agile, and can run fast when the situation requires it. And yes, the situation will require it very frequently
Visually, the game is inspired by Blade Runner and the claustrophobic confines of Hong Kong's historical Kowloon Walled City and the hub areas are filled with an impressive amount of detail. The game uses the lighting system of Unreal Engine extremely effectively and even though it doesn't natively support HDR or utilize Ray Tracing, the combination of light and shadow with the detail in the decaying city environments and, uh, somewhat more nasty areas you must navigate through is pretty astonishing for a small indie game with a core development team of fewer than a dozen people. The team actually had help from Sony and Epic Games with development as this ended up being something of a high profile project for PlayStation Indies and ultimately took almost 7 years from its original conception as "HK Project" to release
I want to comment on the game's incredible soundtrack, which sounds a lot like both Half-Life 2's memorable soundtrack and also the NieR titles. The game's soundscape is filled with running or dripping water, running fans, music playing from jukeboxes, and then your cat suddenly needs to RUN LIKE HELL and the music just kicks in and the camera pulls back and it's a really dramatic experience. The sound designers really killed it with this game's audio, it's really really good. Also, your cat has a Meow button. I'm just saying
This game is about 8-10 hours long and never wears out it's welcome the whole time through. It's refreshing to play a nice short game which gets to the point, tells the story it's trying to, gets you through a couple of semi-open world hubs and several action and stealth set pieces, and then sends you on your way after a wonderful experience. I can see why this game got nominated for and won all the awards it ultimately did. This was an amazing little game which really was a lot bigger in scope than I could have expected. If there is such a thing as a "AAA Indie" title, Stray is it. It's at a level much higher than what you expect from any sort of Indie game, and quietly it's one of the best games I've played to finish out 2024
On PC I was able to play Stray at 4K/120 fps and it looked and ran great with no significant bugs besides my Dualsense controller occasionally just going haywire near the end and I'm not sure why but unplugging and plugging it back in fixed it the few times the issue cropped up. Oh right, if you hate shader compilation stutter, this game uses UE4 and has it and there's no option to pre-compile the shaders, fortunately this only happens when you travel to a new area and then it's smooth again
Final Rating: 9 Lives out of 10
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