[imagesource: Annapurna Interactive]

Being a cat in a loving home is a pretty good gig.

Basically, your humans pander to your every need once you become adept at the art of emotional manipulation. A video game based on that sort of life would be a tad boring.

Stray, a new game from Blue Twelve Studio and Annapurna Interactive, doesn’t focus on such a cushy existence. Rather, it follows a cat that falls into a city filled with robots trying to find its way home.

I first saw The Guardian’s five-star review and my interest was piqued:

Stray is an excellent example of how a change of perspective can enliven a fictional setting to which we’ve become habituated. Post-apocalyptic narratives have been done to death lately, but this one feels interesting because we experience it from such an unusual point of view.

Accompanied by a drone, which acts as a translator between the robots, the cat and the player, we make our way through a city sealed off from the world, trying to make it to the outside, where we belong.

The review stresses just how true to real-life your cat character is. You can press a button to meow, just for the hell of it, and there are numerous places for you to curl up and take a nap.

There’s no actual gameplay reason for you to nap or claw various pieces of furniture, but the game allows for both.

Some gameplay and the trailer for your perusal:

Back to the gushing review:

This is a stunning-looking game, whether witnessed from the ground or the rooftops – I won’t spoil the cat’s journey, but the developer wrings copious novelty and some impressively creepy moments from this shut-off city in the seven-ish hours it takes to play through.

Engadget is also full of praise, labelling Stray “a beautiful balance of exploration, puzzle solving and soothing cat activities”:

Compared with most dystopian cyberpunk games, Stray is downright joyful. It’s a perfectly contained adventure game with plenty of fresh ideas, each one pared down to its purest form. Even the meow mechanic.

Various monsters and foes are tackled along the way, you form an emotional connection to the unnamed cat you control, and themes ranging from wealth inequality to environmental disaster are touched on.

One more written review before we finish with a video. This from The Verge:

The first time the cat puts on its harness is one of the funniest moments I’ve experienced in a game.

Stray lets you linger, but it also doesn’t overstay its welcome. I played through the entire thing in two sittings because I couldn’t put it down: I just had to know what happened next.

Look, the game had me at ‘cat’.

There are loads of reviews on YouTube extending well beyond 20 minutes. I don’t want to cut into your midday Instagram Reels cat video session too much, so here’s a succinct one:

[sources:guardian&engadget&verge]