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Last night I finished the game "Stray", released earlier this year by BlueTwelve Studio. I played it on the PS4 but it is also available for the PS5 and Windows. I really, really enjoyed it, more than I can remember having enjoyed any other game I've played in a long time (not that play an awful lot of them).
As a *game*, it's fairly lightweight. That sounds like a criticism, but I genuinely don't mean it as one. I'm just trying to calibrate your expectations. It took well under a week to complete, okay, playing a little more often over the holiday period than I would always find time to while working, but by no means did I binge play the thing. It's just relatively short and relatively simple. I never got stuck on any of the puzzle elements for more than ten minutes and I never got frustrated trying and failing for hours to get past what felt like impossibly overpowered enemies. Again, don't take this the wrong way, "Stray" is absolutely not a boring, stuck-on-rails interactive fiction kind of game where you just run between cutscenes. Far from it. I found it engaging and enjoyable to play from start to finish. I just want to make it clear to any hardcore gaming types that if you want something "meaty" with complex strategy that you will find a real challenge to complete, or wildly non-linear, open world freedom that you can explore for months on end, "Stray" is definitely not that.
But what "Stray" *is* is a delightful, heartwarming and visually-stunning mashup of neon-drenched cyberpunk dystopian cityscapes, 90s-era retrocomputing, cheesy 20th century cinema / comic book robot designs, modern day street fashion, generic East Asian spirituality, and ridiculous cat antics. It feels astonishingly fresh even though all the individual elements are stuff you've seen before and the storyline is trope city. I feel like I'm handing out a lot of back-handed compliments here and it's really not my intent. I'm *not* knocking the game for lack of originality. On the contrast it's honestly a solid artistic achievement that the creators have managed to pull all of this stuff together in such a way that it really truly does feel new and unique and charming. I am a fan. I want to read graphic novels set in this world.
I think the extent to which the game's Wikipedia article suggests that the "you play as a cat!" game mechanic has forced a radical departure from typical game design is possibly a bit over blown, but maybe I'm just cynical. But it *is* really well done and if you are a cat lover you will be delighted. The game is very obviously made by and for cat people. You can knock things off shelves and jump in boxes and get your head stuck in paper bags even when it has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with advancing the story or the gameplay. It's just the freedom to be a cat, doing cat things. It's glorious.
I have only one real criticism: there's no possibility to manually save your game. It's autosave only, and the automatic saving is triggered by getting to certain places and/or doing certain things, not on a timer. If you haven't managed to trigger a save for a while but you really wanna stop playing *now*, you are going to lose progress. In general this works pretty well and there was only one occasion where I was genuinely frustrated and had to keep playing longer than I wanted to avoid losing 15 minutes of play. But this kind of thing drives me up the wall. With the computing and storage resources we have in 2022, not letting players save whenever and wherever they want is straight up user hostile design and it needs to go away. But for "Stray", at least, this is more of an "in principle" argument than a "this really caused me problems" argument. Also, I have managed to successfully redirect my anger at this detail away from the game's developers and instead toward the author of some absolutely, enragingly ridiculous justifications for this detail that I found online when doing a quick search to confirm that there really, truly was no manual save option. Just listen to this nonsense:
Stray proves that manual saving is not an essential part of a modern gaming experience. Instead, the details in Stray allow gamers to focus on the beautiful world that BlueTwelve Studio created. As players explore each chapter in Stray, interact with their environments, and engage with various characters, they'll be able to immerse themselves in the experience IN A WAY THAT THEY WOULDN'T BE ABLE TO ACCOMPLISH if they were focused on saving their progress manually
(EMPHASIS mine)
Can you believe this? Having the option to save wherever you want, whenever you want, if you want, detracts from immersion and exploration in a good video game in *exactly* the same way that having "pause", "stop" and "play" buttons on your VCR or DVD player detracts from immersion in a good film, or that owning a bookmark detracts from immersion in a good novel; not at all, not ever, not even a little bit, not even once. Truly, there is *no* technical design decision so bad that you won't find at least one person willing to insist that, no, really, this is *progress*!
English Wikipedia article on "Stray"
Ridiculous boot-licking review spouting nonsense about manual saving