Released on July 19 stray, an analog video game produced for Windows and PlayStation by French developers that speak a lot for themselves. in stray The protagonist is a cat who must try to find it by moving to an underground city deserted by men but populated by robots, machines and carnivorous bacteria, the Zorks.
Practically speaking, it’s a rather intimate game, made above all the dark atmosphere broken by the cat’s meow, which moves freely between alleys, rooftops and houses in a setting inspired by The Walled City of Kowloon, which was once an independent and busy district of Hong Kong that was built vertically on different levels. The hero cat – who has no name – lived at the top of this deserted city, before falling inside and ending up in the lower levels, populated by humanoid robots threatened by the growing presence of harmful bacteria from which to escape.
The cat must return free of charge to the hospitable place where she lived before. To do this, he must climb the deserted city to find different things and solve problems with the help of robots, who have the same desire to see the free world, and for this they help him. In the early stages of the game, the cat finds a small drone – called a B-12 after the game developer – that provides him with a backpack so he can interact with the robots and technologies he encounters as he progresses.
The story can be completed in about seven hours of gameplay, but everything is different from how you decide to pursue it: it can be completed in two hours, sticking to just the main story, or in more than eight hours by spending time exploring it. Peace .. all the twists and turns of the city and the completion of secondary tales that abound.
Thanks to a targeted promotional campaign that capitalized on the undisputed popularity of cats on the Internet, the contents stray It’s been circulating a lot on social networks for weeks: it’s currently one of the most followed video games streamed on platforms like Twitch and YouTube, and users seem to be evenly split between males and females, which is not uncommon in a region that is still predominantly male.
Reviews were unanimously positive. the edge he wrote who – which stray “It improves adventure games by turning the user into a cat, changing the perspective that the genre needs.” Alexis Ong he wrote Instead of that ribbed That production company BlueTwelve “could put it in a slum steampunk From the Victorian era and would still have had the same effect: constant care and concern for our little orange friend.
After many unsuccessful experiences in role-playing video games with goats, geese, dogs and sharks, one of the keys to the success of stray This seems to be exactly what fits into the role of cats, which in terms of size and ability are able to offer a different and interesting gaming experience, while staying within the confines of the world as we know it.
The game was created over seven years as an independent project by French developers known under the pseudonyms of Koola and Viv, and were reunited with BlueTwelve after working at Ubisoft. In 2016, the two published some excerpts from the game online and in the same year Annapurna Interactive, an American production company, became its distributor. Four days after launch, stray It remains the most downloaded video game on Steam, the leading aggregator of video games on PC, and one of the best-selling video games on PlayStation, as it has also been included in the catalog of downloadable games for Plus subscribers.
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