Stray Review: Is it Worth it?
Excuse my lack of writing gaming news and articles. I have been sick with COVID. Yep, I got COVID. It wasn't fun. I was sick for a solid week and have just been pretty behind with work and my writing. Now that I'm better I thought it would be cool to test out Stray. The cat game that everyone, including me, has been hyped for. It's all over TikTok, it's all over Streams, and it's all everyone talks about now. I wanted to play it to see if it's worth it or is it just hyped due to being able to play as a cat?
Stray First Impression
You start off the game as a Stray cat (hence the name) that's hanging with a few of his fur friends. This is where you're immediately enamored over the fluffy cats, ability to meow, and you get a feel over the mechanics. You're roaming around what seems like a sewer or near a sewer interacting with the other cats, scratching on nearby bark, and jumping on railings. Eventually, you fall and you're separated from your friends. I was screaming when I saw this little kitty fall from such heights and not land on four feet. You start to follow computer monitors guiding you to a room where you find a drone, who eventually, gives you the cool cat backpack.
After some time you're now in the slums and there are no humans. You're in a cyber post apocalyptic world where humans have died out and are replaced by robots. These robots try to mimic human behavior by tending to plants that don't need sunlight, going to bars, cleaning up spilled paint in front of their stores. This is where you're free to roam around to take in the city and at first it feels very large because you're a small cat. Not going to lie I had a lot of fun scaling buildings and meowing at robots, unfortunately, this doesn't last long.
There's only about 5-8 hours of gameplay. The world itself is not that big, which makes sense, for a game that's not that long. I like the different puzzles you can solve with your cat and trying to use the environment around him to solve missions; It was rewarding meowing to make someone drop a can of paint on the ground to get inside the building. The enemies are gross looking they basically jump onto your skin and try to suck the life out of you. If you have too many on you you can die but spawn close to the area you were killed at.
Should you buy it?
If you purchase Playstation Plus subscription you can play it for free this week. That's the only reason I hopped on it as fast as I did. You can just test out the subscription services and if you don't like it cancel it. Since I already had the subscription service in the past I only had to pay $17 to get Stray, and on market now, Stray is around $29. For the price I paid for it was worth it. You still are getting almost 8 hours of gameplay if you want to 100% complete the game.
There are collectibles and memories you and your drone companion can find. That distracts you from the main storyline. It also helps you to figure out what happened to the humans around this world. Your main objective is to get outside, but it's hard, when the world itself is dying from viruses and disgusting creatures who suck away your life. The plague wiped out the human population and the city the robots are living in right now was a shelter originally for humans to survive. It's a dark story and it's one you should pick up.
Stray is available now on PC and PS4/PS5.
