Game With The Best Story

There are some games that I can only describe as "an experience" because giving any other overview never does them justice. These types of games are the ones where everyone who plays them ultimately experiences the same thing but their reaction to it varies wildly. Stray is a game that I fell in love with the moment I first played it, and since then it has also become one of my favourite games to watch people play.

Stray is a game set in a post-apocalyptic world where it's implied that humanity has long since gone extinct, in our wake a race of robots survives whose behaviours are modelled on humans who they call "the soft ones" whilst maintaining their own culture and society that has evolved on its own. The robots live in a large enclosure called Walled City 99, a mega structure originally built by humans as a refuge that was placed into quarantine and has remained that way ever since.

The protagonist of the game is an unnamed cat who becomes estranged from their clowder [I had to google what the collective noun for a group of cats is and that's an odd name but there you go] the rest of the game is spent trying to reunite the cat with their clowder by traversing the city.

The art style of the game is incredible, the visuals are stunning, the attention to detail is insane, and the ambience is immersive and entirely believable. The city itself resembles Kowloon, which was a small densely packed structure within Kowloon City in Hong Kong. The game developers invented a language and an alphabet that the robots use that looks like an amalgamation of Korean, Japanese, and some elements of Latin and Cyrillic thrown in, which fits quite perfectly with the lore that it was invented by the robots from combining the human influences they were originally exposed to.

The one thing I love most about the actual gameplay is the ability to explore, especially the verticality of the environment, there's something incredibly satisfying about playing as a cat and reaching the highest point you can in the level and looking down at everything.

The story itself is compelling, but very hard to discuss without spoiling it completely, there's also a lot of room for interpretation and speculation, this is one of those games where Game Theory on YouTube has really sank its teeth into the canon and picked apart everything we're told explicitly and run wild with their imagination. I have a particular view of the ending of the game and my interpretation of it which I will save for another day.

Stray is a game that I would love to see made into a movie, the only problem with that is the protagonist never "talks" at any point during the game because they are a cat and the game does hold onto some semblance of reality, you do interact with other characters though many of whom communicate much needed information as you play. I really don't know how you could translate the game into a traditional movie without involving dialogue in some way, although having said that I happily sit and watch people play this game for hours and that's never been an issue so maybe movie studios just need to take a risk and accept that the main character can be silent?

Whilst Kowloon has long since been demolished and gentrified, the closest thing to the architecture and the environment of the city in Stray that exists in real life, or at least will soon exist, is a megastructure called The Line, or Neom, a smart city under construction in Saudi Arabia designed to be self-sufficient. Stray was released in 2022 and in the aftermath of the pandemic the story touches a nerve, especially the element of quarantine and lockdown in the interest of public health. It's not inconceivable that somewhere like Neom could end up sealed to the outside world if there was a dangerous outbreak within it, or in the case of Stray, an outbreak outside it that the city locks down itself trying to shield itself from.