It’s just one of any number of ways the game encourages you to live in the moment, to be present, to experience the fleeting now of it all. If anything, it feels sort of like those “lo-fi beats” screensavers that captivate people for hours on end on Twitch and YouTube. The whole audiovisual experience of it all is your reward, and there’s something refreshing about that. The camera pulls back, the sound effects get a little more diffuse, and if your subwoofers can handle truly subsonic bass, you’ll feel as much as hear the purring of your little feline character as he drifts into a slumber.
And it doesn’t do so by saving your progress or refueling your energy or any of the normal sort of video game rewards. At odd intervals it encourages you to scratch out on a spot on a rug, curl up, and nap. In fact, aside from obvious action set pieces, it’s exactly the opposite. The curious thing is that neither the game nor the world in which it’s set puts a ton of pressure on you to do so at any appreciable pace. It’s obvious from the giddy-up, though, that the goal is to return to the surface to be with your feline family. That plants Stray firmly within a tradition of fiction that employs architectural stratification as a metaphor for social stratification-everything from Metropolis to Star Wars: The Clone Wars to the theme song for The Jeffersons-with the major difference that in the world of this game, there’s no society left. One day, though, he falls into the sewers and ends up in a dystopian subterranean cityscape highly reminiscent of the Kowloon Walled City by way of the Los Angeles seen in Blade Runner. You play as a cat-not a cartoon or anthropomorphic cat, but a bog-standard Felis catus whose only skills are meowing, jumping, and scratching things, who roams the surface of a post-apocalyptic world with his family. You wouldn’t necessarily pick up on that from the premise. Those help, but what really makes Stray such a wonderful experience is that it uses all the hooks, tropes, and trappings of video games to say something fundamental about the nature of life that’s wholly antithetical to everything we think of as inherent to gaming.
Not because of its graphics or sound or even because of its gameplay. It’s a bit too early to say whether Stray will join that pantheon, but it might.
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