For this critical play, I played Stray, a third-person cat adventure game by BlueTwelve Studio. The developer of the game invites the player to care about the world through its main character and its overarching narrative, creating a sense of initiative in the player to want to learn more about the world in order to help the cat protagonist we play as.
To begin, Stray’s main character, a small orange cat, and the conflict it faces, greatly helps in helping the player care more about the world of Stray. The game immediately teaches the player a few things about the protagonist through the tutorial: they are a cat who does cat things, and they make up a small group of four cats trying to survive in a seemingly abandoned civilization.
It lives a rather straightforward life with its companions until this day where it falls down a deep chasm with no hopes of climbing back up to its life on the surface. Stray employs a cat vs. environment type of narrative conflict in order to drive its plot, with the end goal being clearly defined: to somehow return back to the surface. Players will thus be curious to explore the world around them, trying to find a means to return to the surface.
The use of a cat main character introduces its own unique quirks: we see this world completely from a cat’s point of view. While the player, as a human being, can likely make out more familiar sights in Stray’s worldbuilding than can an actual cat, the developers also obscure information from our eyes in other ways. Specifically, the Dead City’s alphabet script is completely unique to the world of Stray. While players may instinctively search for recognizable signs for clues, none of them hold information that they can immediately decipher, making the player just as blind to the city as if they were a cat. And while Stray’s alphabet has been decoded somewhat, a new player will not be made immediately aware of this, as such increasing reliance on supporting characters such as B-12 who can bridge this language barrier. Through purposely obscuring information, players are placed in the point of view of a cat, encouraged to approach the world through other means in order to understand it.
Stray’s lonely setting and environment further push players to wonder about the world, making them care more about the protagonist and its inhabitants. In both the surface and the Dead City, the player is met with large, manmade structures that have been seemingly abandoned for a long time. On the surface, plants grow on the walls and through the cracks of the Walls and, more importantly, we see no other animals aside from the three other cats making up the protagonist’s group. The world feels abandoned, overgrown, and empty.
The empty feeling is hammered in with the introduction of the Dead City (see below). The city is a concrete jungle, under a constant fog and dimly lit with industrial lights. Strangely, however, there appears to be no sign of life anywhere, outside of strange creatures that turn out to be deadly. The Dead City is in stark contrast with the tutorial world on the surface, which at the very least had plants, the protagonist’s cat friends, and natural light. With such dark surroundings, the player feels compelled to find a way out and to bring this separated cat back to somewhere capable of sustaining life. But in order to do so, they must figure out why this city is the way it is and figure out how exactly they will leave. And so, in hopes of finding more information, the player must continue traversing this eerie landscape devoid of life.
Lastly, the most straightforward way Stray gets players to care for its world is through its inhabitants. NPC interaction is a core game mechanic, required to gain information to gather items to progress the story. It is further bolstered by the fact that we are a cat and don’t know anything about the things we pick up: only by showing them to others can we learn more. Thus, players are constantly interacting with every possible NPC, showing them items and gathering information. Through these interactions, we learn more about the City and its people: the humans are long gone, bacteria ravages the city of artificial and organic life, and these robots had aspirations of finding the surface, but failed and gave up. By making it necessary to interact with NPCs to solve puzzles, Stray expands on the world’s inhabitants and makes us sympathize with their struggles.
Having the player control a cat introduces many mechanics tied to a cat’s biological abilities. For example, being able to jump high, survive long falls, navigate narrow and small passageways, and being fairly agile are all traits inherent to cats. It comes at the cost of missing core information about the City, but the player eventually learns more with B-12. All these choices positively contribute to the experience delivered by Stray.
The discussion of ethics becomes interesting when considering the City’s inhabitants: humanoid robots that accurately mimic human speech, thought, creativity, and emotion. They even share human’s frailty, being targets of the bacteria themselves (although their lifespans far exceed humans). In many ways, the robots feel no different from humans. Thus, it begs the question why these robots were seemingly abandoned in the Dead City. Had they been seen as subhuman because they were robots? The use of robots calls into question the character of Stray’s humans, reminding us of humanity’s tendency to discriminate against others they deem to be ‘different.’
