Stray

A sad little story with several delightful and beautiful moments.

The cat is, of course, cute but it's the meticulous environmental design that will make your jaw drop. To me it's easily the beating heart of the game. The lighting, the colors, the architecture, and the strewn objects are all some of the best I've seen in a long time and the superb and subtle soundtrack complements them perfectly. That said, animations and physics could be better. Unfortunately, there are also little paper-cuts and even bugs that can break your sense of immersion and remind you that you are playing a less-than-perfectly-polished game.

So, what's to do? It's mostly exploration but there's also lots of click-through dialog (no voice acting), simple puzzle-solving, and even some combat, none of which are amazing but they do what they need to do for this fairly short game. Fortunately, the 3rd-person (3rd-cat?) controls feel quite fluid and suitably feline. The camera is also very easy to use while keeping you grounded in the cat's point of view. Great job on fine-tuning it! So, it's a nice experience traversing the stunning environment.

The story gets a lot of praise, but I found it simplistic. It fosters an immersive atmosphere but not much else, and the characters are also rather flat.

All in all, the gameplay and story won't wow you, but the design absolutely will. Play this for the right reasons.