What a strange title you have? What does this have to do with everything… No, not a byte! Now I’ll explain everything, but point by point and in order. I warn you in advance that the text below is NOT a comprehensive review of all aspects of the game, but just a subjective review of what I paid attention to.
Koti-i-i-ik! :)) Well, how can I pass by? Past these little eyes, antennae, nose, paws, tummy, tail and in general? Yes, I’m a cat person! 🙂 And, if anyone is a dog lover here..
I went to the colorful lights of cyberpunk, and got… post-apocalypse. And yes, for me such a turn is a plus. Because I respect cyberpunk, and I adore post-apocalypse!
And if anyone thinks that Stray is such a cute game without worries, where everything is bright and beautiful, they are mistaken. Yes, there are locations where everything sparkles and shimmers, where the color is red on the right and blue on the left, orange on top and green on the bottom. And the local atmosphere exactly corresponds to the fundamental principle of cyberpunk – High tech, low life.
And yet, the characters here are robots who have either gained self-awareness or only imitate the life, appearance and habits of people. But people here became extinct, were exterminated, destroyed by their own invention. Naturally, I won’t say which one, but since leather bags wished everyone to live long, it means we have a post-apocalypse. And a very good post-apocalypse under a bright, effective sign and in the shell of a noir cyberpunk. And then both genres briefly turn into a shell for horror!
Naturally, there is no blood, guts, psychopaths, monsters and demons, but you turned on a small, simple game about a cute, lost cat, and here are not only very dirty and cluttered streets, but alleys, there are whole locations where everything is covered in something creepy and disgusting, and then you see the eyes! Giant eyes that look at you from all sides from the walls!
So what does “Love, Death and Robots” have to do with the sequel to “The Lawnmower Man”?? It’s simple with the series. In the second episode of the first season and in the first episode of the third, three robots travel around the world and try to figure out… Why, why, why did these little people become extinct?? Most of the robots in Stray are passive, but some of the active characters in their thoughts about the past just reminded me of the characters from the series.
But this is a personal association https://wanejobetscasino.co.uk/ from which no message follows. But with the sequel to “The Lawnmower Man” everything is getting more serious. The film itself is an outright B category, or something worse. But the bottom line is a duology about a man who got lost and flew into virtual reality.
He clung to her and lived not here, but there. Then they took him out of there, returned him to reality and, in the end, we see him on the balcony, where he sits with everyone who helped him and admires not a virtual, but a real sunset. What is this for?? Where is the connection? Well then… Let’s remember Stray.
The vast majority of robots in the mysterious dark city do nothing. They just sit, look at monitors or generally into the void, wrap themselves up, supposedly meditate, think about philosophy, but in fact about nothing at all.
There is dirt around them, mountains of rubbish and garbage, but they still sit and look at the world with smiley faces on the monitors. Monitors on legs simulate life and are tied, glued to the monitors. Monitor – the meaning of life. And a monitor instead of a head. And the cat… The cat is a strange, incomprehensible phenomenon, from which monitors almost invariably display surprise emoticons.
Perhaps I’m wrong and I see something that isn’t there, but it seems to me that Stray is not so much about a cat in cyberpunk and not about a cat in the post-apocalypse, not only an appeal for the environment, as was, for example, in “Blade Runner”, and not even about those who huddled in the slums of the fortified city of Kowloon. It seems to me that Stray is at least also about nerds, about those who look at the monitor almost 24/7 and communicate with the world through colored pixels on their screens.
About the unfortunate people around whom there is collapse, but they are unable to do anything because they simply do not know how to live outside the virtual environment. They live in stuffiness, darkness, and all aliens from outside cause genuine surprise, if not horror. And only a few of the nerds are able to stick into the monitor to find out how they can get out of the stuffy apartment, take a little walk and look at the sky, the blue sky and the sun, but not made of pixels, but the real one. And only cats, by the power of their cuteness, can help them overcome their addiction, so as not to google about the sky, but to take it and go out into the yard.
True, ahem, if we’re really serious and honest, then we need a game not about a cat, but about a dog. Because the cat, in general, doesn’t give a damn about the owner, who is plugging into a monitor in a stuffy room. They either sit at home without any problems at all, or they will ask to go outside, but exclusively for themselves, and not so as to drag the owner along with them 🙂 But the legend says that it is cats, seals, and not biting, evil and generally bad dogs that rule the World Wide Web! 🙂
Cons:
There are none. Cats are perfect! 🙂 Whoever is against is a dog lover and therefore..
Well, okay… What do we have here?? Parkour without the danger of falling. This is because Stray is so sweet, relaxing and innocent that there is simply no room for the cat’s unfortunate falls from a height? Well, let the cat not die after falling, because he has not nine, but 100,500 lives. No, the cat here is not immortal at all and dies both from an attacking predatory little thing, which I won’t tell you about, because it’s a spoiler, and from discharges of electricity from the vigilant guards on the way to the finale.
Lengthy and unintuitive missions in open locations. At IXBT, Misha, aka Mikhail Shkredov, said that Stray is a game of inhalation and exhalation. The StopGame review said the game is good and has a good sense of when the player needs a change. Therefore, linear locations, where you need to jump in the obvious direction in order to escape from enemies a little later, are every now and then inferior to locations where you can wander around to your heart’s content, climb, meet someone in order to learn something, and so on. And everything is fine with this, but what’s not good is that in locations with characters, “go, find, bring” missions almost reign supreme.
At the same time, one character needs to go, find, bring, in order to get from him what he needs for another, and so on until the result we need. Maxim Orlov on StopGame said only this, and I will also add that… The game is still about a cat! About a smart cat with a smart drone in his harness pocket, but still a game about a cat! What then am I asked to find, or rather, to steal clothes for one character, but before that… Damage three surveillance cameras, get a cassette as a reward, go into the back office of the store, find a tape recorder and insert the cassette to distract the store owner? Even if they poke me in the pink nose with a task involving damage to government property, but still… Such a chain is intuitive?! There are also simple and even elementary, but interesting puzzles! Why can’t you focus on them??
First-person view is not the view from behind the cat’s ears! First person view is a view from the eyes, damn it! But no, I repeatedly tried the first-person view and the top of the cat’s head and his ears were always clearly visible at the bottom of the screen. Why did they introduce a first-person camera in principle, if they didn’t implement it exactly as it should??
A task where the cat could die. It’s a small thing, but I’m freaking out about the final assignment where we need to… Scratch the wiring in the electrical panels! At the same time, when we tear it apart, sparks will fly from there, which means the cat could say goodbye to nine and all 100,500 lives. Who came up with the idea to do just that?? Nobody could come up with anything safer for the fluffy, helpless protagonist?
Okay, the cat needs to sleep, and I need to wrap up. Stray wasn’t perfect or even cute from start to finish. Stray turned out to be sweet, sad, sad and a little creepy. What’s especially good is that the game is not meaningless. And the meaning that seems to me, although perhaps banal, is framed and presented in a very beautiful, sweet and touching package. And now… Ciao!