Sitting down to play Stray, I hadn’t realised how becoming a first-time cat owner would so profoundly shape the experience. A tiny ragdoll kitten, Milo, had just entered my life. This silken ball of fur, full of curiosity and charming mischief, pawed his way into my heart. Every morning, he climbs onto my chest for pats, and if he’s sitting on the countertop and I offer my back, he leaps on to begin exploring the room from his favorite platform: me. Milo meows for attention, purrs in satisfaction, and “caws” excitedly when a fly buzzes in, prompting a spontaneous two-person hunting party. Milo prepared me for the adventures ahead.
Stray, developed by BlueTwelve Studio and published by Annapurna Interactive, has been widely dubbed the “cute cat game,” but this undersells its emotional depth. Darting through the neon-lit underworld of a forgotten city, tail in the air, it isn’t the atmosphere or the puzzles which clutch my attention, it’s how right the feline vagabond feels. Stray moves naturally between running and leaping, climbing and falling. It paws gently at rugs, sharpens claws on lounge chairs (a Milo favourite, much to my chagrin), and knocks items off ledges for no reason at all. Then stretches, sprawls, and naps. My favourite detail though is when Stray flops under the weight of a new backpack, then shifts into a crouch, stretches its back legs, and slowly learns to keep moving. When Milo received his new harness, he had a similar progression but elected to walk backwards first. As BlueTwelve’s Swann Martin-Raget explained in an interview with USAToday, even office cats reacted to the in-game cat’s meows, confirming the studio’s devotion to realism.
But Stray is more than a masterclass in feline animation. It’s a richly imagined world, shaped by the haunting beauty of urban decay. The game’s environment, inspired by Hong Kong’s now-demolished Kowloon Walled City, evokes the same claustrophobic wonder I feel when watching Blade Runner. Like Syd Mead’s iconic futurist visions, the world of Stray drags the past into the future — rusting pipes become playgrounds, neon signs flicker over crumbling brick, and the city hums with the traces of a lost human presence. As Mead once said, architecture becomes a “magical background,” and in Stray, every surface invites exploration.
Exploring this labyrinthine world as a cat evokes a sense of vulnerability and resilience. The robots that populate the city were once servants but now survivors, their metallic frames dressed in beautiful fabrics woven of wires and cord, representing a makeshift society grappling with memory, purpose, and grief. Through the cat’s unlikely friendship with B-12, a tiny drone companion, Stray introduces themes of connection and sacrifice which carry genuine emotional weight. In the final scenes, as stray nuzzles and meows softly at the still form of a fallen friend, I shed a tear for the love and loss shared between companions, and the quiet power of their presence.
There is magic in stillness, in curling up next to a robot musician, in the quiet of an abandoned alley, in the softness of moments stolen from a collapsing world.
When Milo sleeps by the window, sunlight warming his fur, I feel a mix of contentment and anxiety – the outside world is filled with both beauty and danger.
Does Milo long for this kind of adventure?
Would he slip through the cracks of a familiar world into something stranger, something darker?
Would he come back to me?
