‘Stray’ is an interactive, adventure video game featuring a ginger tabby cat

This is a cat adventure game that has been on the radar of game reviewers and aficionados for some time. It is about to be launched. You play a ginger tabby cat (and therefore a male) in a strange dystopian world populated by robots. The city in which this cat lives has a mysterious past. The cat has to overcome dangerous threats and uncover the city’s past and find a way back to their cat family. The cat shares the limelight with a flying robot called B12. I think that this is why the cat wears a backpack which allows them to communicate with B12 and the robots in this weird but very interestingly constructed world.

The robots talk and dress like humans but they clearly are not. Some of the robots are friendly and some aren’t. “Grandma” is one of the friendly ones.

The number one enemy in the game are creatures called ‘Zurks’. They are small tick-like, face-hugging creatures! It looks as though the designers of the game picked up on the fact that sometimes cats acquire ticks which are dangerous in that they carry disease. They made them bigger in this game. There has been a decent amount of research as expected on domestic cat behavior. The cat uses their innate abilities in survival to get around and deal with the Zurks.

 
Most of the gameplay is concerned with puzzles and exploration. Environmental puzzle solving is an important part of the experience. The cat explores the city and there’s lots of vertical movement in line with the typical movement of a domestic cat.

Platforming is very much involved. Jumps are scripted. The game lets the player do all the things that cats love to do such as push objects off ledges and rub against the legs of robots in scent exchange. You can also do the usual scratching of surfaces and curl up on old mattresses. There is a dedicated meow button in Stray. You can push this button as much as you want because after all you are playing a cat. However, the cat cannot be customized.

Uncovering the mysteries of the city is one of the main pillars of the story. You can unlock memories which provides information about the game’s world such as who inhabited the world before the robots.

This dystopian world has plants growing but there is no sunlight.

If you play the game on PS5 you can enjoy the dual sense features. This is not a very demanding game in terms of the capabilities of your laptop if you are playing it on a laptop. The video on this page explains the system requirements which essentially are an Intel Core i5-2300 and 64-bit processor and the Windows 10 operating system. You will also need a decent graphics card such as NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780, 3GB | AMD.

As you can see, I have used the video for information about the game. Real cats watch the video game with a keen interest:

Note: This is an embedded tweet. Sometimes they are deleted at source which stops them working on this site. If that has happened, I apologise but I have no control over it.

According to CNN “Stray” has “quickly become an online phenomenon delighting humans and cats alike!”

That’s because cats like to sit at the screen because they are stimulated by the presence of the game’s ginger tabby and I guess cat lovers are going to like it because they can step into the shoes of a cat albeit in a dystopian, strange world. There’s lots of cat-like movements and behaviour which is interesting. They say that it is “beautifully animated and offers a respite from video games that are often noisy and action-packed. Also, playing as a cat is unusual and amusing.”

P.S. Although officially it is not possible to customise the game including the cat’s coat colour, it is possible if that interests you to modify the game and change the colour to grey or black.

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