I saw a trailer for Stray a couple months ago on Steam and was instantly intrigued. This is a cyberpunk atmosphere puzzle/3D Platformer where you play as a cat walking through an abandoned mega city.
The first thing that hits you when you play this game is just how good the graphics are. The background of each scene has meticulous detail to everything. from the drip of a faucet to lighting of a building far off in the distance. The scope of each area feels much bigger than it is because the background is so vastly animated.
Another thing that is amazing is how realistic the movement of the cat is. I don't know if they put the little 3D capture ball on a cat and recorded it or not, but it is amazingly accurate to how a cat moves and acts in most scenes.
The dialogue is fun and pretty extensive for having few characters. The emotional attachment you can have to robots in this is weird. After you leave each character it feels bittersweet. The way the cat communications with everyone is pretty unique to this game.
The platforming and puzzles range from very obvious to, wander until you see a "press button prompt". I like adventure games and I like wandering around and exploring in games. So the points where I was lost was by far my favorite. Although they were not hard enough puzzles that I had to look up anything, that is until the very last chapter when my wife was getting frustrated with me taking too long to progress and looked up something I probably would have not figured out just from the hints given.
The game does feel like a "walking simulator" at some points where there is little interaction with the environment besides hopping around and crawling under things. Although, this doesn't matter because the environment is sometimes scary, sometimes funny, sometimes amazingly rendered.
I ran this game at 60FPS with a Radeon 5700 and didn't have a single issue and didn't have to tweak the graphics or anything. Although for some reason my video card bugged out and green screened at after finishing the game. This could have just been a fluke.
My only grips with this game is that it is too short, finishing it in about 6 hours! I also find the cat main character to be just a little too smart for reality. Maybe this game should have had some kind of cyber cat mod sequence to explain the cats hugely successful social and problem solving skills. I don't think cats are really this good at making friends or solving problems in real life. I could be wrong, as in real life I don't like cats. Which is funny because I liked this game.
This game made me want to play Cyberpunk 2077, which I still haven't played. Or maybe some shadowrun on Genesis or the tactics game. I just watched the Netflix cyberpunk anime and I guess I'm just in a cyberpunk fan loop and this game helped fill some of it.
Play this game for yourself, you will be amazed. If you can get this game for cheap its an instant buy in my opinion. I generally only buy games based on a $1 per hour of entertainment. This only took me 6 hours to beat, you do the math on what I think it should be priced.
Pick it up for cheap at Amazon here:
