Stray review: a triumphant cyberpunk adventure about being a cat

My first death in StrayThe punch was swift and sharp. The swarms of vicious, scurrying creatures that attacked my soft and limp body made it feel weak. The screen flashed red and encouraged me to “retry,” but the message was clear: You Died. When this occurred the first time, I held on to my belief that my cat protagonist was simply unconscious. Surely, I thought, this adorable game wouldn’t actually let me die. My delusion soon crumbled. I discovered that the creatures known as Zurks were created from experimental bacteria. They can eat any and all metals. I glanced at my real-life orange boy, Oni, who’d been yelling at me through this whole sequence of events, drawn to the sound effects and frenzied Zurks. Welcome to “playing Stray with a cat.”

Stray isn’t just an adventure RPG — it’s a psy-op made for people who love cats, especially if you grew up watching Bound Homeward. It’s not quite the same premise, but the same strain of emotional anguish watching sweet animals brave treacherous circumstances. Sally Field, thank you so much for being Sassy. I’m reluctantly conscious of the fact that the constant presence of Oni, a tender little coward who wouldn’t last five minutes outside, informs my perception of Stray’s protagonist; I suspect that many cat owners — bless toxoplasmosis — will form a similar connection. Most people don’t like to see animals get hurt, so there’s an instant sense of emotional and psychological investment, compounded by a default instinct to protect the baby.

A family of cats lives in lush, green and sunlit ruins. I’m just a tiny orange guy, and life is good — full of playing, sleeping, and exploring. It’s a short tutorial area where I play around with the cats’ lifelike movements and vocalizations. Stray is mostly a straightforward platforming game with some puzzles sprinkled in; in lieu of combat, there’s a focus on the catlike ability to sneak, evade, and escape. When I fail to complete a task, jump from a pipe. My peace is broken and I end up falling to my death. As I disappear into the darkness, my loved ones are helpless. My body is a pile of garbage in the bowels a forgotten town. It is dark and it is not grass. I’m alone, and it’s devastating.

Image: BlueTwelve Studio/Annapurna Interactive via Polygon

Stray’s premise is simple: Get home or die trying. Sometimes I am literally tased, sometimes not. One day, in the Dead City I meet a flying drone, called B12. He lends me a small backpack that is cat-sized to recharge my battery and keep key items safe. I can hack into doors and talk to others with it. We meet a community of robots — “Companions” who once served now-extinct humans and continue to go through the motions of humanlike life. One of them is the Outsiders. This small group believes in the mythical blue skies. Soon, my small personal goal to escape folds into a bigger narrative about survival in a police state, under a conspiratorial veil about whether “Outside” even exists. Apart from the Zurks there are police, perilous sections and cat parkour as well as ominous organic growings in every corner of the city. There is also a mysterious new horror hidden within the sewers.

Movement is pretty familiar if you’ve ever watched a cat: acrobatic leaps from perch to perch, the butt-waggling low crawl, and a couple of occasions for a back-arching yowl and hiss. There are a few cozy spots to sleep, including a nice warm robot belly, and I deeply enjoy rubbing up against strangers’ legs and watching their little face-screens blip out a heart in response. I’m able to push things off shelves, open doors and carry objects in my mouth. The inherent catness of my behavior is a constant delight, and feeds back into my unwavering devotion to my little guy’s safety, like an unmoored eye of Sauron watching for danger around every corner.

I’m forced to run from Zurks in several places, which makes it difficult for me as an individual. It is also prime movie time, for Oni who can be heard ranting about the small, pixelated creature that is his doppelganger, and all of its chittering companions. I’m playing on PC with a Nintendo Switch Pro controller, which robs me of the PlayStation rumble function for purrs and meows, but on the other hand, probably saves me from having to constantly dislodge Oni from my hands.

Stray, much like real cat thinking, there’s nowhere to go but up. The city is structured as a vertical dystopia — a widespread sci-fi concept in pop culture from J.G. Ballard Gurren Lagann. Low income and disenfranchised tiers of society are the poorest. Those living in higher rungs live in a blurred world of consumerism. Whoever’s in control lives at the top. Later, I find a Metro map that delineates the Lower Town, Upper Town (“Midtown”), and the uppermost Exit. The cyberpunk influences are obvious, with neon signs, narrow alleys, and incredibly dense, haphazard architecture à la the Kowloon Walled City. The permalink Tong lauStil tenements and the ubiquitous flyposting with local eight-digit phone numbers, there’s an undeniable sense of Hong Kongness here, which isn’t surprising, given that Stray’s working title was “HK project.” (BlueTwelve’s website still uses the domain hk-devblog.com).

Image: BlueTwelve Studio/Annapurna Interactive

I can coast across Stray believing in both this Hong Kong identity and authorship, reading into every bit of flavor text about small, everyday forms of resistance against state oppression, and the importance of art in “desperate situations.” These aren’t unique to Hong Kong — resistance art in particular has been a core part of political expression for centuries. The city’s struggle to maintain autonomy within the limits of its special administrative region status under the Chinese government has inspired people all over the world with its “be water” protest tactics to repel police tear gas and move as one. Hong Kong police brutality was an international theme for several years. Then, in the end, protesters and leaders of resistance were publicly persecuted. Midtown was reached in Stray, all of these threads come together when I see civilian robots being hassled by “peacekeeper” cops. However, my expectation of a dramatized showdown with the porcs is rather knee-jerk. Stray isn’t that sort of game — it’s about staying small, unseen, and alive.

Prior to the credits rolling, I assumed that Straywas created by a Hong Kong developer. I prefer to learn as much as possible before playing a game. BlueTwelve Studio was founded in France by an obscure duo hailing from Montpellier. This early branding was so common that it led to a misconception. BlueTwelve Studio created an FAQ post explaining its inspiration and origins.

The developers said that they wanted their own unique flavor of dystopia, but that’s hard to fully do when Western cyberpunk relies on such a fixed set of uniquely East Asian visuals. This isn’t to say that Stray fails at creating an evocative, familiar world — BlueTwelve’s tribute to Hong Kong is well executed and full of detail. But it does make me wonder when the games industry will bestow the same kind of Annapurna-level attention on projects made by actual Hongkongers that invoke the Hong Kong identity in deeper, more personal ways (like the currently-in-development The name of the will).

Image: BlueTwelve Studio/Annapurna Interactive via Polygon

Thankfully, Stray’s uniqueness doesn’t hinge on its cyberpunk setting. I’ve written at length about this before, but cyberpunk has largely been exhausted as a vehicle for critique, and in many cases, it’s used mostly to convey an instantly recognizable idea of modern dystopia. Frankly, BlueTwelve could have set this in a Victorian steampunk slum and it still would’ve had the same effect: constant care and concern for our little orange friend. The game’s most expressive settings are hidden behind the city’s drab gray walls — charming, rundown residential interiors with CRT monitors, portable radios, and shades of 1970s oranges and greens. This lends a much-needed sense of temporal depth to the game’s unspecified future setting. My favorite scene is a Nam June Paik-style jumble of old TVs tuned to a twinkling starlit sky — a chaotic altar to technology with a curious sense of spirituality.

Finally, we come to mortality and endings — a wretched inevitability that all pet owners dread. There’s a bittersweet inversion of this notion at the end, with an inevitable goodbye (no, it’s not what you think) that compels me to try and hug Oni, who squirms away from my grotesque display of maudlin human emotion. Stray The film ends with a hopeful but vague note that felt unacceptable to me. I am a selfish person who loathes uncertainty when it comes cute animals. It takes me a second to step back, after the credits, to gather my thoughts and mentally vacate the role of “cat protector.” I realize I have drunk deep from the well of kitty Kool-Aid, and I’d do it again.

Stray doesn’t do anything new. But through strategic manipulation of our love for cats, it does give me a profoundly sentimental window into my relationship with Oni — my first cat, with whom I am admittedly obsessed. He was always there as I played, which made for an odd meta experience. Stray’s emotional design. It’s a markedly different journey from cultivating care for a character in a typical role-playing game, whose quirks and lovable characteristics must be learned over time, through dialogue and gameplay and storytelling. Every small detail in StrayThis was a great reminder of the short time I had with Oni and my other on-screen pals. BlueTwelve had spent so many hours modeling the behavior of real cats and was very aware of what was happening. However, it was refreshing to have a real cat in my arms. StrayThis is, quite fittingly, the work of smart cat people. And for this reason alone, it’s a triumph.

Stray On July 19, the game will release on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5 (Windows PC), and Xbox 360. Annapurna Interactive provided a prerelease code for the game. The PC review was conducted using that code. Vox Media also has affiliate relationships. They do not affect editorial content. However, Vox Media might earn commissions for products bought via affiliate links. Find out more. additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.