Stray (for PC) Review

Monday, December 26, 2022

Fulfill your feline fantasies! Knock coffee mugs off the table. Scratch up furniture. Climb to places you were never intended to reach. Meow incessantly. All while playing an adorable bundle of fur trapped in a quirky robot-populated undercity, unraveling the mystery behind the disappearance of mankind. Stray ($29.99) is a puzzle-adventure game with platforming elements that delivers an utterly charming protagonist, set within a quirky and fascinating setting. There are a few limitations that keep the game from being truly excellent, like the limited jumping controls and context-sensitive actions, but Stray is still a thoroughly engrossing PC game in spite of this. Come for the cat shenanigans, and stay for the hope and melancholy that Stray invokes as you explore a rich world bereft of humanity.

Little Cat in a Big City

You play as a ginger tabby cat living in concrete ruins with a family of felines. An unfortunate accident separates you from your family, dropping you into a massive underground cityscape. You learn very quickly that the streets are hostile, serving as host to swarms of murderous creatures called zurks, which look like cycloptic head crabs from Half-Life. After a few close encounters, you come across a sapient drone you can communicate with, who becomes your companion throughout the adventure. Named B-12, the drone serves as your guide, communicator, and inventory as you eventually find your way into habitation zones within the city. These safe areas are populated by kindred robots that have isolated themselves from the chaos.

Robots have evolved to occupy the space left in the wake of humanity’s absence, and have adopted very human-like mannerisms. These robots have names, unique outfits, and distinct personalities. They all eke out a living within the city, whether that be scrounging up materials from junk, serving drinks, putting on performances, policing the neighborhood, and so on. Many of them have tasks they want to see completed, which they’re more than happy to tell you about. It’s up to you to solve these problems for them by acquiring materials, destroying cameras, or engaging in lengthy trading quests for something they want.

Some of these tasks are optional, but most are not. You must explore each new area and interact with these robot NPCs to learn what they need, while also taking note of points of interest within the environment that you want to return to. For example, you may smash some security cameras for a group of punk robots and be rewarded with a cassette tape, which you can’t make use of until you find an old boom box in the other part of town.

This is Stray’s core game loop: explore a zone, solve puzzles, complete objectives, acquire key items, and ultimately move on to the next zone to do more of the same. This is not a bad thing. I found the exploration and movement to be quite relaxing, and the setting to be surprisingly gripping. Stray evokes themes found in Nier: Automata and SOMA, without the camp of the former or the dread of the latter. The world is beautiful, yet inexplicably sad too.

(Credit: Annapurna Interactive)

Simplistic Action

That’s not to say there isn’t action. Many of the larger quests take you through hostile, zurk-infested zones to complete objectives. But your cat isn’t a claws-out sort of fighter, and zurks attack in massive swarms that can overwhelm you in seconds. Like the habitation areas, many of these action zones are puzzle-like in design. In most situations, you are expected to outrun, outmaneuver, or corral the swarms as you find a solution, such as a hidden switch or doorway.

There are chase sequences on occasion as well, where there is no solution at all save for fleeing the swarm as they pour into the streets around you. Because Stray leans heavily into the adventure genre, the lack of direct combat is acceptable. While I would have liked to see some claws-out fighting, that clearly wasn’t the intention or focus, and I don’t believe this detracts from the game.

Later in Stray, you encounter hostile robots and drones that you must evade. Stealth becomes crucial during these sections, so you must carefully navigate large rooms and avoid blue searchlights to reach your objectives. Again, the stealth is serviceable, but rather simplistic when compared to more dedicated stealth-action games. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, this game is not, though there are boxes you can hide in to throw enemies off your trail.

The stealth and action have a slightly tacked-on feel to them. It’s as if the higher-ups insisted on slapping some form of action into the game because they were afraid a game about a cat exploring a city wasn’t good enough. I think the game would have been better served with a pure exploration/adventure focus, with additional attention put on cat actions and interactions rather than action.

(Credit: Gabriel Zamora, PCMag)

Needs More Feline Tomfoolery

Stray's interactions are highly scripted, and I wish they were not. For example, the game has platform elements, but there is no dedicated jump action. Jumping is all context-sensitive: you point the camera to a ledge or feature that is climbable, tap the jump button, and your cat automatically makes the leap. You cannot jump around at will; your cat is entirely grounded if there are no objects to climb.

In Stray’s defense, the game offers a lot of climbable environments, so it is rare to find yourself in a situation where there are no vertical options whatsoever. Likewise, the scripted jumping makes platforming simple and satisfying, since your cat reliably jumps exactly when needed, so you don’t need to fuss over distance or timing. On occasion, the cat may get stuck in some corners or edges when running into them, perhaps due to uneven plane mapping. This is thankfully infrequent, so jumping feels intuitive and reliable the vast majority of the time.

On the other hand, it is a touch disappointing that I cannot leap at my leisure, and can only perform the action when I want to commit to climbing something. A happy medium, where the cat can jump freely with the tap of the button and auto-platform while you're holding down jump, would have really made this aspect feel much less limiting.

This holds true for other cat interactions in the game. Environments feature elements like pillows and cloth to curl up and sleep in and walls, carpets, furniture, and doors to scratch up. The vast majority of the time, these interactions are optional and serve no purpose other than looking cute, which I appreciate. What I don’t like is that I can only do these actions at designated spots. Why can’t I claw on a robot’s legs for attention? Why can’t I sleep on furniture or keyboards? These functions would have been vastly more amusing to use if they were dedicated actions players could perform at any time, and not merely context-sensitive interactions you can only do in specific places.

Meowing, on the other hand, is a perfect example of what I'd like to see more of. You can do it at any time (even in some cut scenes), and it's largely superficial. It can be used to attract zurks in some cases, but the vast majority of the time I used it for no reason other than to vocalize and make some noise. It’s adorable, and I really wish that other interactions, like scratching, sleeping, and jumping, worked like this as well.

(Credit: Annapurna Interactive)

Can Your PC Run Stray?

Stray is available on PlayStation consoles, but if you want to play on PC you should check to see if your setup can run the game. To meet the minimum specifications, you should have 64-bit Windows, an Intel Core i5-2300 or AMD FX-6350 CPU, Nvidia GeForce GTX 650 Ti or AMD Radeon R7 360 GPU, and 8GB of RAM. The recommended requirements bump the CPU to Intel Core i5-4790 or AMD Ryzen 5 2600m and the GPU to either Intel Core i5-4790 or AMD Ryzen 5 2600. For more detailed specs, check here to see if your PC can run Stray.

On a desktop PC with a Ryzen 5 3600 processor, Nvidia RTX 2080, and 16GB of RAM, Stray performed well at 1440p. With its graphical settings ticked up to max, the game played at a fairly consistent 60FPS, with a few dips to the mid-50s on occasion. On Steam, Stray features full controller support, Steam Cloud saving, Steam Trading Cards, and Steam Achievements.

Stray is also Steam Deck verified. The game ran extremely well on Steam Deck during testing, with smooth 30FPS gameplay and sparse hitching during loading and caching, which occurred very infrequently.

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Feline Fun for All Walks

Stray is an engaging and thoroughly charming adventure game, though we fully admit we are biased towards cats. Cat paws may have had a hand in this review. Joking aside, a few elements could be better implemented than they are now, like the action and jumping. We also wish more cat actions could be performed at all times, beyond just meowing. Looking past these limitations, however, Stray offers up a fantastic adventure and a fascinating setting to explore. Stray explores what it means to be human when mankind is gone, showing us a sad, yet beautiful world that marches on without us. If you like adventure, or cats, or cats on adventures, give Stray a try.

For more recommended PC titles, check out our list of The Best PC Games. If Action is more your speed, take a look at The Best PC Action Games. For in-depth video game talk, visit PCMag's Pop-Off YouTube channel(Opens in a new window).

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Pros

Endearing feline protagonist
Relaxing exploration and interactions
Tense, but not overly stressful puzzle action
Engrossing setting

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Cons

Jumping is context sensitive
Feline interactions feel limited at times
Action and stealth feel simplistic

The Bottom Line

Stray is a wonderfully endearing game about humanity in a world without humans, delivering quality feline exploration/adventure, with some passable action thrown in.

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