@cathoderaydude and I finished playing Stray (2022) last night. It's a wonderfully atmospheric game that ultimately is hampered by cowardice in game design.
Stray's flaws are that at some point in development, the developers got scared that they had no idea what their game was, and instead of riding with that they panicked made the most generic 3rd person adventure game possible. I would have completely written off the game an hour in if it wasn't for the fact that you got to play as a cat, and the story was intriguing enough, and early reports were that the game was easily completed in 5ish hours.
The game's biggest strength, that you get to play as a cat, is hampered by the feeling that the protagonist could be replaced by any other type of creature and the game wouldn't change much. You are driven forward by motivations that no cat would be interested in, and it's fairly immersion breaking to be told, as a normal cat, to "Go take care of the power while I hack the mainframe." The main NPC you travel with acts as your voice, the voice of other characters, and as your guiding hand to various tasks and objectives. Things are explained to you in a completely normal fashion, as though you'd understand and care about the words and motivations as a cat.
The genericness of the gameplay is such that, at a certain point in the game, your cat gets armed with a gun to kill enemies with.
Instead of trying to be a more straightforward Metroid, Stray should have been Shenmue.
And I suppose that's the crux of the problem; I and, judging by the reactions I've seen, many others expected a more laid back, immersive world to be a cat in than what we ultimately got. After finishing the game, I couldn't help but feel what a wasted opportunity it was.
Ideally, the game wouldn't have saddled you with a narrative and tasks related to the narrative. Cats act on their own whims at all times. What if instead we got a game where we could hang out in a city as a cat, hunt mice and birds, run from dogs, and either cause havok or slightly improve the life of the city's inhabitants by just being a cat?
Stray seems to be doing well enough that I hope the developers take such feedback and continue to work on their cat tech, and maybe give us that ideal cat simulator in their next game.
i simply want to walk and look and observe. objectives are a fuck
