Read our full Stray review
If you love cats, you’ve got to play Stray. If you don’t, Stray might change your mind. It’s a short, fairly simple game that excels at atmospheric detail. You control a little stray cat who gets separated from his crew and tossed into a creepy, retro-future city. The environment is exquisitely rendered, the music sets the mood perfectly and, most importantly, your cat is adorable.
They’re also perfectly animated, with spot-on classic cat behaviors like scratching rugs, flopping over to play, or… riding in a bucket through a dystopian underground wasteland. There’s even a dedicated “meow” button for when you just need to let it out, a tool you can use to occasionally hilarious effect once you start interacting with the robot citizens of the underworld you explore.
In some ways, Stray is a classic third-person adventure game, though the focus is on puzzle and exploration far more than combat. But switching the protagonist from a person to a cat does wonders for the whole vibe of the game, as well as the ways you can explore — as a kitty, there’s very little in the way of vertical boundaries. But, you know, you can’t talk. That’s where your mysterious virtual companion B-12 comes in. B-12 is trying to recover its memories, and the bonding of a cat and a bodiless intelligence is one of the more unusual and unexpectedly moving pairings in recent game history.
As well as puzzle-solving, ledge-leaping and blob-dodging, Stray introduces a world of lighthearted dystopia, where robots don’t hate the humans that came before them. Instead, they attempt to cultivate plants that can survive in the dark, just because people would have liked that. Compared with most dystopian cyberpunk games, Stray is downright joyful and one of the best PlayStation 5 games you can get. — N.I.