At the time of the announcement, Stray immediately attracted attention, first of all, of course, by the fluffy protagonist, a brave cat traveling through a cyberpunk city populated with works. As a rule, such games take you through the plot in a few hours trying to surprise you with the story told, and Stray is just such a game. But not really.
IMMERSIVE CAT
After a short prologue in which the basic rules and interactions are taught, the first surprise awaits us – the game has several open locations where you can move almost freely. This is not Skyrim at all, but closer to small Tomb Raider locations. The second surprise is that there are side quests in the game that are not necessary to complete, but very desirable if you want to learn more about the world in which there was no place for people.
How many years have passed since the creation of robots, count yourself
Well
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Well, the third thing that will surprise you is that no one leads the hero by the handle, no arrows, maps and GPS. Only your attention and a few signposts on the streets. This factor turns the game into a real immersive simulator, and without any reservations. The characters give a task and a rough course of action, then you have to ask passers-by who will not tell you exactly where to go; consider signs that only give visual cues, because all the inscriptions are made in the language of robots. Several tasks have everyday logic and the main difficulty of such tasks is to guess that the solution is really simple.
Some tasks are built in such a way that they can be solved by skipping some of the steps. For example, near the safe, we find a note with an old cipher, which can only be deciphered by one person (sorry, a robot) who understands old programming languages, that is, a local hacker. We go to him, he says that the clue leads to a bar and there will be a cipher behind the picture. But wandering around the city, I stumbled upon this bar earlier and accidentally found the code even before I went to the hacker. That is, the game does not turn off triggers and allows you to find a solution before you go through the entire scenario chain. I consider this the right decision.
Of course, no one forbids you to quickly rush to the final credits, there is even a corresponding Trophy here, to complete the game in less than 2 hours, but from the first passage you are unlikely to succeed so quickly, expect somewhere around 6 hours. But it is much more interesting to watch the life of robots, trying with all their might to imitate their creators. From going to a bar and a nightclub to social stratification. Yes, they are now the masters of this planet, but not a word more, otherwise I will spoil all the impressions of the discoverer. Moreover, very often you can find cute and funny Easter eggs.
Looks like someone forgot something in the car
In general, the world is very similar to the one in the Blade Runner movie, neon signs, fast food windows overlooking the street, inscriptions in an incomprehensible language formed by a symbiosis of existing languages. But unlike the densely populated Los Angeles of the future (although for us it is already the past), the streets of residential areas of Stray have only a few robots. And not the whole game takes place in cities, there was a place for sewers, abandoned unfinished buildings, and at one point the game turns into a real body-horror (don’t worry, there will be no visual spoilers).
CAT PARCOUR
Obviously, most people will turn on this game just to play as a pretty cat, and I can’t blame you for that. Fluffy is really made as if he had just stepped off a brand new leather tattered sofa for which you have been saving for six months. In addition to damaging furniture, wallpaper and Persian carpets, the cat not without pleasure throws objects off the shelves or the table, rubs against his legs, carefully examines the packages or boldly falls asleep right in his arms, leaving the opportunity to move at least somehow. Regarding sleep, the game even has a Trophy to sleep for more than an hour of real time. Although I’ve been waiting for the whole game until he coughs up wool and never waited. There is still a lot of work to be done on the perfect cat simulator ?
Trophies are generally a separate issue in which the developers tried to break away no less than in the game itself.
It’s easy to guess what happened a second ago
But behind the incredible level of sophistication of a cat’s life, many nuances are hidden. And not surprisingly, they all come from the advantages of the game. Stray is first and foremost a game, and with a capital letter. Specifically, in this case, this is really a problem, because it was shown as something simple, bright, unpretentious and about a cat.
In fact, Stray could be one of those games that you can introduce people to interactive art, and if you give a gamepad to a person who has not played video games before, he will simply get lost there. Yes, it’s fun to jump on roofs and air conditioners as a cat for several minutes, cat parkour is implemented surprisingly realistic and convenient, but outside of individual gameplay elements, in order to complete the game, you need to understand game mechanics and logic, which can be difficult for a beginner.
And not only for beginners, many video game fans may not like the developers’ approach to the sandbox, which does not lead by the hand. In addition, you often have to run back and forth in search of the necessary NPC or item in order to complete the quest. It might just be boring. And due to the lack of a task log, I would advise you to complete the game in one gulp in 2-3 evenings. If you take a long pause, you can just forget what they want from you.
Some of the capabilities of our partner, a small drone, are given for a very short period of time, you simply do not have time to play enough of them. In the first open location, we are given too much time, if you set out to complete all the secondary tasks and sniff every corner, it just starts to get boring. Although the developers skillfully alternate between linear and open levels, and if you don’t get too hung up, then such juggling with decorations perfectly dilutes the passage.
And in the end it turns out that Stray is difficult to recommend to everyone at all, because in addition to a cute cat simulator and an interesting history of the world, it hides a simplified immersive simulator, a genre that in itself is not very popular among players. And whether you want to go through the game to the end depends only on the mood with which you take the gamepad in your hands. And yes, I recommend the gamepad, and preferably DualSense. Separate mechanics are perfectly complemented by the functionality of the PS5 manipulator, which only contributes to identifying oneself with a small red cat.
No spoilers
TOTAL
Stray is a game about a world that died a long time ago and living beings in it are trying to somehow exist. The cat acts as a guide looking into different corners of the remnants of civilization, and so we see the small and large stories of this world.
