You can linger and take the time to explore, and I wish I could do more of that – there aren’t too many secrets in each area, but there is something worthwhile revealing intriguing information about what happened in that long time.
You find routes up buildings, jump over chasms and carefully sneak past danger, as well as fetch keys, communicate (via drone) with robots and figure out how to use the trinkets you come across.
I didn’t have much trouble with any of Stray’s puzzles or challenges, but that may be because I grew up with a combination of 3D platformers and point-and-click adventures in the 1990s, and Stray is a mix of the two. Perhaps the least plausible aspect of the whole setup is that the cat can actually be very helpful. Tramp sounds like a superficial meme – it’s a cyberpunk cat game! - but the setting and story are meaningful, and in the end, I honestly found it quite touching. Accompanied by a drone that acts as an interpreter between robots, a cat and a player, we make our way through a city fenced off from the world, trying to get out to where we belong. Lately, post-apocalyptic narratives have been beaten to death, but this one seems interesting because we experience it from such an unusual perspective.
The Tramp is a great example of how a change of perspective can spice up the fictional setting we’re used to. I am a wild, mysterious, perfect thing in a broken world. The robots, who have lived here alone for countless decades, have never seen anything like me before, but they still feel obligated to pet me when I rub against their thin metal legs.
But this time, I’m sneaking around the fluorescent-lit slums of the future as a skinny ginger cat, climbing rusty pipes, squeezing through barely-open windows, and pounding on corrugated-iron roofs. I many times walked through decaying cyberpunk cities like these, with their ubiquitous neon signs and dirty streets, their dirty verticality.