While some other games did toy with ingenuity, most of them felt immediately too off-putting to be enjoyed by 99% of gamers, with the likes of Scorn and Immortality immediately coming to mind.Advertisement
Admittedly, the premise doesn't sound all that enticing: you play as a cat in a post-apocalyptic world, and one day you fall a long, LONG way down from the surface, and find yourself lost and alone in a massive subterranean city completely populated by sentient robots. As you try to find your way back to the surface, you also uncover the truth behind the apocalypse, and help the robots to find their true place in the world.
The gameplay itself is incredibly easy, as you run and jump your way around platforms, with the action leaning less towards combat and more towards stealth and, when the moments come, sprinting for your life. But what helps Stray to lodge in your brain and remain there even all these months later is the story, the atmosphere, the world we're exploring. The mood feels like it is somewhere in between Wall-E and Half-Life, capable of flipping the whimsy of a fun conversation with shy robot on its head in a heartbeat, turning into a creepy - at times properly scary - biological horror.