Entry tags:
memo to self ...
... in re Pandy, loss of: do not try to play Stray for a bit, it doesn't go well.
So Stray is a wonderful little game, in which your avatar is a cat, and you guide it through a post-apocalyptic, vaguely cyberpunky cityscape that's utterly devoid of people, although full of their empty homes and businesses and artifacts, and instead houses a fairly sparse population of robots all going peaceably about their business. It's mostly exploration and route-finding, at least to date, with a bit of puzzle-solving and questing as you gradually construct the backstory narrative of the city and its weird, giant-cylindrical, abandoned environs (it's some kind of artificial habitat, I haven't got far enough to work out what, but the city's ceiling is circular and dotted with lights). You start out in a much more sylvan and beautiful environment, all overgrown vegetation and water and your happy cat colony, which seems to be inside the wall of the city. You then accidentally fall into the city and have to try and find your way back to your family, hence all the puzzle-solving and route-finding. You're not quite a standard cat, there is some kind of assumption of augmented intelligence in the puzzles you have to solve, but the little animations when you interact with bits of the city, drinking from puddles and scratching random bits of furniture and sleeping on cushions, are very feline and very adorable.
The game has the most amazing atmosphere - not just because you're playing a kitty, but in the gentle, wistful, slightly surreal flavour of the environment itself. The robots are enormously endearing, both your own little floating sidekick, and the angular, ungainly, slightly sad and vulnerable personas of the larger npc robots you encounter. My favourite so far is one little mini-quest where you can find bits of sheet music scattered throughout the world and bring them back to the guitar-playing robot, and he'll play them for you - lovely, gentle, jazzy, bluesy tunes (mostly), and you can either sit and listen, or curl up on the cushion next to him and sleep while he plays.
But. The minimal sense of threat in the game (at least so far, I'm fairly early on) comes from the zurks, which are horrible little red-eyed robot crab things that occur in swarms and will chase and eat anything living - which, so far, is only your kitty self. (My current theory is that the zurks ate all the people, leaving only robots, and cats.) If you don't evade them (which is tricky, memo to anyone else inspired to try this, don't try to play on PC with a keyboard, it's optimised for controller and the keyboard interface is horrible and will make you fail to outrun zurks inevitably and repeatedly) you are swarmed, and your poor little kitty is eaten. It's not graphic, you are simply piled by zurks, but I cannot, it transpires, handle even the minor glimpses of the little recumbent dead kitty-form amid the swarm at this stage of my personal cat journey, it's deeply traumatic even though you immediately reload at the last save point absolutely fine.
So, yes. I love this game, but it's on temporary hold, despite my jonesing for a kitty-fix, until I am not likely to be traumatised by losing my feline avatar. Which is a pity, because I'm dying to see how it turns out, and to deepen my acquaintance with the world. Ace game design, ten out of ten, would recommend. Just not when grieving a cat.
So Stray is a wonderful little game, in which your avatar is a cat, and you guide it through a post-apocalyptic, vaguely cyberpunky cityscape that's utterly devoid of people, although full of their empty homes and businesses and artifacts, and instead houses a fairly sparse population of robots all going peaceably about their business. It's mostly exploration and route-finding, at least to date, with a bit of puzzle-solving and questing as you gradually construct the backstory narrative of the city and its weird, giant-cylindrical, abandoned environs (it's some kind of artificial habitat, I haven't got far enough to work out what, but the city's ceiling is circular and dotted with lights). You start out in a much more sylvan and beautiful environment, all overgrown vegetation and water and your happy cat colony, which seems to be inside the wall of the city. You then accidentally fall into the city and have to try and find your way back to your family, hence all the puzzle-solving and route-finding. You're not quite a standard cat, there is some kind of assumption of augmented intelligence in the puzzles you have to solve, but the little animations when you interact with bits of the city, drinking from puddles and scratching random bits of furniture and sleeping on cushions, are very feline and very adorable.
The game has the most amazing atmosphere - not just because you're playing a kitty, but in the gentle, wistful, slightly surreal flavour of the environment itself. The robots are enormously endearing, both your own little floating sidekick, and the angular, ungainly, slightly sad and vulnerable personas of the larger npc robots you encounter. My favourite so far is one little mini-quest where you can find bits of sheet music scattered throughout the world and bring them back to the guitar-playing robot, and he'll play them for you - lovely, gentle, jazzy, bluesy tunes (mostly), and you can either sit and listen, or curl up on the cushion next to him and sleep while he plays.
But. The minimal sense of threat in the game (at least so far, I'm fairly early on) comes from the zurks, which are horrible little red-eyed robot crab things that occur in swarms and will chase and eat anything living - which, so far, is only your kitty self. (My current theory is that the zurks ate all the people, leaving only robots, and cats.) If you don't evade them (which is tricky, memo to anyone else inspired to try this, don't try to play on PC with a keyboard, it's optimised for controller and the keyboard interface is horrible and will make you fail to outrun zurks inevitably and repeatedly) you are swarmed, and your poor little kitty is eaten. It's not graphic, you are simply piled by zurks, but I cannot, it transpires, handle even the minor glimpses of the little recumbent dead kitty-form amid the swarm at this stage of my personal cat journey, it's deeply traumatic even though you immediately reload at the last save point absolutely fine.
So, yes. I love this game, but it's on temporary hold, despite my jonesing for a kitty-fix, until I am not likely to be traumatised by losing my feline avatar. Which is a pity, because I'm dying to see how it turns out, and to deepen my acquaintance with the world. Ace game design, ten out of ten, would recommend. Just not when grieving a cat.