1.5/5 ★ – FoofDeckman's review of Stray.

[Spoiler-Free] Haha look it's a cute funny cat game! Isn't it so quirky how cute this cat is! Look it does cat things, like scratch (but only on specific objects) It knocks over stuff on tables (but only certain objects, and the tables you're able to jump on are limited), BUT HEY! At least there's a meow button! Now outside of my sarcastic cynicism, this is one of those cases where the entire internet almost unanimously disagrees with me. I feel people automatically look at the gorgeous art direction and animations of this vibrant Cyberpunk world and the cat the inhabits it, only to immediately love it on presentation alone. And yes, the visual presentation is easily the best part of this game. It's obvious the developers focused their talents on atmosphere and general aura of this world, which might also be the reason everything else in this game falls so flat on it's face. Starting with the positive, as I already mentioned the art direction is truly incredible. I don't want to lightly brush over how beautiful Stray is, even more impressive coming from an Indie developer. The streets are both grimy and beautiful, filled with bright neons that contrast with the overwhelming smog that fills the corresponding landfills throughout most of the districts. The sound design is masterfully incorporated too, the varying pitter patters as the cat navigates over different terrain or the sounds of squeaky metal as you ride a bucket to a different floor. The wide variety of fluent animations for even the simplest of actions add just the right amount of immersion for you to believe in what you're seeing. From a technical standpoint, this is something to marvel at, and that alone is probably the main reason people were tricked into believing they love this game. Which is why it's so disheartening that I didn't get the same enjoyment from my gameplay experience. For a game that's main gimmick is "you play as a cat", it never really embraces the concept to the extent I wish it did. The game sprinkles these "quirky cat mechanics" like scratching at a wall or rug, sometimes you're able to lay in a cat bed or even type random letters into a keyboard by walking over it, but it never reaches the point where it doesn't feel like just a gimmick. The scratching mechanic is the only cat-based element that genuinely influences the gameplay experience, but even then, the times it does this are slim. You could honestly get rid of the cat entirely and replace it with some alien creature and the game would playout exactly the same. What if there was a level where you had to meow to get someone's attention, or what if you had to scratch up a rug to find something hidden underneath? ANYTHING? PLEASE! USE THE CAT!! There is nothing in this game that requires you to be a cat and I feel that's a huge missed opportunity. I found myself extremely frustrated with the level design in this game. At times they're extremely linear but on a whim will flip to something more arbitrary. Stray never manages to make a balance between these two formats and ends up creating a game that's incredibly inconsistent and poorly paced. I had a great time going through the more linear sections in the game, as I felt this better suited the game's mechanics, but suddenly I'd be thrown into these giant town sections and be forced to wander in confusion as to where I was meant to be. There are hardly any helpful indicators as to where I'm meant to go in these open areas, so as a result I'd end up banging my head against the wall in frustration. And I'm typically fine with games not giving you primary objectives and letting you wander and do you're own thing, hell Elden Ring is my Game of the Year, but this isn't that game. This is a linear platformer with incredibly vague and poorly communicated objectives that would rather you as a player to circle the entire map 20 times over the span of 40 minutes while giving you vague hints. It's not fun, it's not engaging, it's just infuriating. Not only is the level design bad, but the platforming itself is hardly even platforming to begin with. Never have I seen such a restrictive jump mechanic in a video game. How the hell have we reached the point in the game industry where in order to make the game more accessible, we get rid of the jump button all together. Whenever you reach a ledge, instead of just jumping there, you press a button to automatically go onto the platform. There's no risk of falling, there's no skill involved. It's just press one button and you've made it across safely. I've never been more disinterested when platforming in a game revolved almost entirely around platforming. It's like if they took the boring climbing sections of Uncharted and made an entire video game based on the one mechanic, hell that's even an insult to Uncharted. At least Uncharted has a fantastic story with likable characters and other mechanics that compliment each other. There's a subgenre of games that I consider "Vibe" games. They're less so video games and more so visual experiences. Games like Inside, Gris, Journey, ones that overall excel in the visual department yet also balance their beautiful art direction with masterworks of visual story telling. Stray is trying to fall into this category, but unfortunately falls flat on it's face with one of the most unengaging and exposition heavy stories I've had the displeasure of sitting through in recent memory. Stray's storytelling attempts to cover a lot of things, but it never really settles on one. Character's come and go before they're even really developed, why am I supposed to care that this person found his long lost father? I met him 30 minutes ago and as soon as I finished this mission he disappears from the game, so what was the point? While the art direction does a good job at taking you into this world, I found the opposite to be the case with the characters. You never feel like you're directly interacting with anything real, instead you're watching other people who you don't know interact. There's a disconnect that I feel could have been solved with a more consistent cast of characters to help along your journey, or at least better established ones. For a game that released nearly two months ago at the time of writing this, it's still littered with a plethora of technical problems. I've had items clip into the cat, I've had robots T-Pose, I've had sections of the game where animations would stop entirely. Sometimes physics props would get stuck into a wall and make this annoying rattling sound as the physics engine doesn't know how to react to an object stuck in the floor. The game is incredibly unstable, now this could just be the PC version, as I've heard the one on console is much more stable, but something needs to change. Most importantly though I ended up soft locking the game 10 minutes before the credits. I road a subway to a different platform and in between levels I paused the game to use the bathroom. Apparently doing this unloaded the entire level as when I resumed, the cat immediately collided with a gate that pushed me under the map and out of bounds. Worst of all, my game saved, so when I went back to load the game I was still under the map, completely soft locking my save file. Luckily this game has a mission select and I was able to load pretty much where my other save was. It was a nightmare, it scared the hell out of me and it rubbed me the wrong way. Typically game stability doesn't really bother me all too much, especially if the rest of the game is great. But major flaws in stability like soft locking after doing such a simple thing, impacted my already negative opinions of this game. Stray was incredibly disappointing and it's hard to believe I was ever excited for it. I actually went out of my way to pre-order this game on Steam, so to see a game I was that excited for just fall apart in front of me in a whimper, felt terrible. I was completely open to loving this game and unfortunately I didn't get what I wanted out of it. This is easily one of my least favorite games I've played from this year. It somehow manages to fumble it's main gimmick, the cat. It's dull, boring and worst off.. pointless.