Stray analysis - time

The avatar we control determines the way we know the spaces in the video game. If we play as the chosen one, we will need to travel and come into contact with the peoples that make up the universe that we must subsequently save, while if we embody a detective our understanding of the world will organize around all kinds of mysteries. We will not move the same as a heroic plumber as a winged dragon, nor will we share the same resources in the skin of a small swordsman in front of that of a huge and almighty God. But outside the game the protagonist is also essential when making us known the proposal. The fact that Stray has managed to sneak into enough lists of the most anticipated games of the year has enough to have in front of an adorable crawl at a time when felines make up much of the Internet culture. However, what has been his best asset when presenting is also the one that makes the title much less forceful than he should. His little protagonist generates a series of contradictions with which the players cannot deal.

Stray is set in a stratified and walled city that is protected and enclosed under a robust dome. The story begins when the protagonist, a wild cat that has grown surrounded by nature, falls by accident inside the wall without further possibilities to leave than to keep advancing gradually inward: from the suburbs to the central area, without having any Type of previous knowledge about what we are going to find. It seems an excellent idea to travel with a cat a dystopian futuristic city. Having the ability to introduce ourselves through any loophole or to use the signs and projections on the facades to gain vertical space, allows us to access new perspectives, shortening distances and multiplying the possible scenarios. The cat we control in Stray is able to jump between balconies, ascend from air conditioning devices and use construction cranes as an impromptu observatory. Later, when we discover that the ghost city is inhabited by all types of androids, it will also be the perfect ally when finding any type of objects and sneaking into the most inhospitable places.

At no time, Stray tells us that his protagonist is more than a normal cat. Much of the interactions we can have with the stage are based on the real behavior of felines, and the game rewards us to do cat things such as maullar, sleep or scratch the doors and arm of the couch. Our avatar does not speak, and at any time we are told that you can understand language neither written nor oral. And yet, the game is designed as if it did. Because Stray is not built by dialogue with his protagonist but giving directions directly to the player. When we first enter the suburbs, the outermost part of the city, which we access immediately after the tutorial, the neon lights, the camera and the screens that we find distributed through the streets seem intentionally to guide us to a very concrete destination. Far from designing the map so that, applying the directed freedom, leads the player to reach, Bluetwelve developers pass over our avatar, to guide us through arrows, written messages and indications based on gestural communication. In one of the first highly dissonant examples we find in the game, the protagonist cat walks through a keyboard by clicking random keys while we, the players, read a message with the following actions that we have to develop.

Almost all the elements in Stray transmit a sense of insecurity that suggests that the team was not very clear how to vehicular the different parts that compose it. Beyond exploration and puzzles, the game works as a graphic adventure for which the different characters we find will consider a chain of favors after which we can get what we need. And here it is no longer just that a cat does not have the capacity to understand the different requests, but that the design of the missions sometimes suggests a human protagonist. During the first hours in the suburbs we know an android grandmother who, in exchange for cans, decides to weave a poncho just for us. Obviously (and as much as I would have liked to get a skin with a cape), the poncho is one of those elements that we will have to deliver a little later. When we give the piece of wool to an android that is too cold to program the length of the piece makes it clear that, when the puzzle was written, nobody was thinking about the size of a cat.

The narrative and the different ideas that the game handles beyond the return to the main character of the main character does not seem especially careful. The title presents a city that was totally isolated from outside due to a health crisis. On many occasions, reference is made to, while the poorest had no choice but to stay in the suburbs, the rich could move to the center and enjoy their many comforts. At the time we explore this city, human beings have already been out of extinct years. However, the androids who created to manage the crisis have taken over, behaving in the same way as those who lived in the territory so many years ago. For this reason, it has no internal logic that suburbs are less populated and that it is the center that suffers from police brutality. Stray takes us over and over again from his universe because at all times he has to remind us that it is a game and that everything works thinking about what we have to play. Although from the point of view of the difficulty curve it is normal that in the last phases of the game we have to face more dangers and challenges, from the internal logic that they have raised us it makes no sense that the oppressed places are more pleasant and safe and safe than the spaces created for the elite. As if that were not enough, and without going into details of its end, the thought that any political system, especially an oppressive one, will be maintained alone without any effort on the part of those who benefit from it is, in addition to the contraintuitive, of a past naivety.

In contrast to his contradictions in design and approach, Stray is a very pleasant title to play. Although how stuck the camera to its little protagonist will generate enough dizziness to the most sensitive players, the fluid form in which we move to reach our destination, together with certain adorable details related to the interactions that we can develop as a cat, They make the adventure have a heart that will more than compensate any kind of speech. And despite the fact that the type of care that poses-dark, dirty, massified and illuminated by neons-is not new in this type of stories, Stray manages to give life thanks to the personality and designs of the androids that inhabit it.

It is difficult to reach some kind of certainty in relation to ** Stray. But his little adventure has some charm, a certain ethereal component, which uses in his favor our own complicity for cats. How important is our avatar on video games! How important is a good entrance door!

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