Stray, the game about exploring a future city as a totally normal cat, won’t be released in 2021 as first revealed. The game is slightly delayed to early 2022.
Given very little of what we saw during the reveal teaser, it’s fine. And during the Annapurna Interactive Showcase we got 4 minutes of actual gameplay.
The cat will start out injured (oh no) for having fallen into this mysterious city.
Traversal is context-based (so it’s not a 3D platformer) from the looks of it, but there will be a lot of places for our feline friend to climb and jump on. There are simple puzzles to solve as well, like carrying a small bucket to block an air vent fan.
Later on, the cat will meet B-12, a small drone that will accompany your journey. With B-12, the cat can communicate with the other robo-people.
The cat is still a cat, and can scratch, drink from bowls, purr and snuggle the robo people. The robo people can return the affection back too, unless they are not cat people. There’s at least one robo-dude that ran off from the sight of the little furball.
There are some tense moments in the gameplay, where you have to run or fight back against a swarm of drones.
Stray looks pretty impressive so far. Though that can possibly be beacuse we really don’t see a game about playing as a regular, non-anthropomorphised cat that ofen.
Still, developers Bluetwelve are delaying it to early 2022 “as we don’t want to compromise on quality, nor the team’s well-being”, as said on their official Twitter:
Stray launches in early 2022 for the PS4, PS5 and PC.