 Hey everyone, we're fully in the dog days of summer, which means it's a time of year when you play games you've never got around to finishing, end up spending your weekends replacing your daughter's power steering pump, lines, and rack, and then think long and hard about the dissolution of the Republic. I play games to avoid thinking about the similarities between pre-season Rome and the current United States, so when there's nothing to play, I find myself depressed. Luckily, while I was grinding through Destiny 2, getting ready to make a video about the current state of the game, my Steam Deck finally arrived. It is awesome. So awesome, I plan on making a video about how much better it is than anything else in Western Civilization at the moment, but after getting it, I wanted to find a game that would be a good title to play in the handheld, and then I realized that Stray had just released on the same day it arrived, so let's talk about Stray, and how it managed to be a wonderful little game despite being incredibly light on gameplay mechanics. I'm a big fan of what I consider to be the best games in the walking simulator genre. While there are several I found awful, like Layers of Fear, titles like Tacoma, Edith Finch, Oxenfree, Firewatch, The Stanley Parable, those are some of the best games of the last decade. I love those games because they use video games to tell compelling and thought-provoking stories in a way that could not be done in any other medium, but then you've got a whole bunch of games that are what I would describe as being walking simulator adjacent. Games that focus on traversal and light puzzles, but still are extremely light on actual mechanics and story, games like The Last Guardian, Journey, Abzu, Solar Ash. Many of these games end up boring me because they don't commit to a compelling narrative, but still have very little mechanically going on. Now there are still good examples of these types of games because of course, the Pathless was really good, I actually enjoyed Gris and Journey is good, but for the most part if a game doesn't have mechanical complexity I require narrative complexity to keep me playing until the end. I was actually going to make a video about Solar Ash because it was a perfect example of how these games can sometimes go wrong for me. It was not a terrible game, it just wasn't particularly good. It was from the developer of Hyper Light Drifter, so I had very high expectations, but it ended up feeling like a design without a real hook. Traversal was kind of slow and simple, puzzles that could barely be called puzzles, and a story that was very very simple, and set in a world that felt like a video game rather than something that grabs you with a vision. I was intrigued by Stray, mainly because the visual style caught my eye, but I didn't have super high hopes, and the funny thing is, many of the issues I have with these types of games are very present in Stray, but it still manages to be a fun little game despite that. In fact, it's almost a lesson in just how little interactivity and narrative complexity a game can have while still being good. Stray has maybe 45 seconds of combat, maybe 3 minutes of stealth, a few incredibly simple puzzles. It's quite short and you spend the vast majority of your time walking around and occasionally pressing A. There's NPCs that you interact with, but you're a cat and can't talk back, so we can't really call that gameplay as it's not interactive in any way. You press a button and NPCs talk at you. The entire game boils down to walking around and looking for a few places to jump up and a few things you can interact with. Stray is exactly the kind of game I shouldn't like, because not only is it extremely simple mechanically, it is very highly restrictive. The player cannot freely jump in Stray. Instead you end up searching for areas the game will let you leap to. You can only interact with an extremely small group of objects. And the puzzles aren't puzzles in a traditional sense, they boil down to looking for a way to cross an area and pull a lever. There's really very little to it at all. But the overall game works for three reasons. First, your connection to the cat. Second, the world you actually move through is so interesting that you find yourself moving forward purely to see what comes next. And finally, the game is almost perfectly paced. The biggest strength of the game is that it feels extremely carefully designed. For instance, at first I found the fact that you can't freely jump to be a bit strange as a design choice, but after a while I realized that this restrictive movement actually serves to realize one of the game's biggest strengths. Which is that you really do kind of find yourself inhabiting this cat. That sounds odd, but it's absolutely true. Everything about the design does an amazing job of making you fully identify with the player character, which is a cat. And not some magical talking cat, just a cat. For instance, because you can't jump, you end up slowly scanning the environment and then carefully jumping up to a place and then stopping and looking around and jumping up to the next place, which, if you spend any time watching your own cat, is pretty much exactly how they move. Developers here have done an amazing job not only animating the cat, but also creating a game that makes you move and interact with the world in a way that feels believably cat-like. You scratch doors, you ruin carpets and sofas, you curl up and sleep, you rub against people's legs, and you meow. Even though there's rarely a reason to actually do this stuff, I still did it because it was strangely fun to do cat stuff. I scratched every carpet just cuz. And to me, that's a pretty good sign that there's something in the design that subtly pushes the player to scratch carpets and doors. The game's lack of mechanics is what makes you stop and take the time to press A to nap. The lack of mechanics doesn't feel like a limitation. It feels like a careful choice that is crucial to getting the player to engage with the core hook of the game, which is to be a cat for a few hours. Now, while this is impressive, it simply would not be enough to carry a game as mechanically simple as this one. I mean, again, I cannot stress enough just how simple this game is. It's amazing how little there actually is to it mechanically. But it still works really well because of how wonderful the actual world design is. Stray story, by which I mean the actual plot, is very simple. The game starts with you and a few cat buddies walking around. You jump on a pipe, you fall down a big hole, and the game's about getting back outside to reunite with your cat pals. You could argue that the story is actually about figuring out what's going on in the world you drop into. But in reality, that's made clear within a few minutes. You're in an underground city that people steal themselves in after they destroy the environment. By the time you come patting along in your little paws, humans are long dead, and the only thing left are the robot helpers they made. The thing that makes the world so interesting to explore is that the level in art design is great all in its own. I found myself exploring every inch of each area because they were small and dense enough that it was never a slog, but also unique and mysterious enough to feel worth picking over. There are only a few major locations and a handful of connecting parts, but each one feels very authentic and engaging. The game can afford to be so mechanically vanilla because the actual levels you move through genuinely feel like they're telling you a story. And while the robots themselves aren't super engaging characters, and the game kind of beach over the head with its themes, those themes were at least interesting, and the world itself does more to communicate them than the dialogue and actual plot points do. This is one of those rare games where you could seriously replace all of the dialogue with a fake language and the actual story would work exactly as well. In fact, it might even have been better if that had been the case. If all the talking had been gibberish, because you know, you're a cat, it might have been even more interesting to piece together what's going on. And you would be able to piece together most of it simply because the level in art design and environmental storytelling is top notch. Finally, the last thing that makes Stray a success and a game worth playing is just how well it paces itself. I've read several odd takes on the game. The New York Times had a column that talked about how the game's plot is kind of trite, and they are correct about that. But then the column goes on to deride the search for realism in games. Now I am constantly harping about how realism is boring and pointless. See my 45 minute video about why I hated Red Dead 2. But Stray isn't reaching for realism. This isn't a cat simulator. It's not pressure washer simulator. It uses excellent art, animation, and light mechanics to make the act of walking around well realized levels as a cat feel interesting. And here's that word immersive, not realistic. The only reason it's able to pull off this trick of making a game with almost no mechanics whose entire original design document was probably, hmm, wouldn't it be cool to play as a cat? It's because of the extremely tight pacing. See, the reason I said Red Dead 2 was a technical masterpiece while also being boring as fuck as an actual video game is because all that realism and graphical and animation power is mind blowing for like 10 hours. But by hour 70, I'm not amazed that Arthur is animated so well. I'm fucking infuriated that I have to watch him slowly and realistically open drawers and pat down corpses for the 600th time. Stray manages to make scratching a door, light exploration, fun little interactive moments and simple mechanics stay interesting because nothing overstays its welcome. And right when it might start doing that, the game is over. Stray is pretty short. I didn't time myself or anything, but I wanna say it was like five hours long, maybe a little less, perhaps a tiny bit more. And in that five hours, you rarely engage with any one thing for longer than two minutes. Each puzzle, if we can even really call them that, is no more than a three minute affair. Each area you explore is broken up into fairly discreet little zones. NPC interactions are extremely simple and they are over quickly. Story moments and founds memories are no more than 30 seconds long. Stray takes you from interaction to interaction and never lets you get bored with something. That seems like a small thing, but game developers tend to be pretty bad at editing themselves down to the core of their design. Think of the endless stream of pointless crafting systems or AC Valhalla's never ending fucking deluge of skill points and base building. Too many games are designed as if the sheer amount of map icons is more important than any of them are worth exploring. Stray could easily try to push itself to 10 or 12 hours, but it refrains and stays fresh and interesting the whole way through. In fact, one of the most interesting things about it is how restrained and tight the actual design is. The game isn't close to perfect, of course. There's a bunch of bad localization, the story's pretty predictable and trite, and the puzzles could have been a bit more substantial. But it deserves praise, not because it's a well-animated cat, but because it's a great example of restraint and confident design. The developers of Stray knew what they wanted and didn't feel compelled to jam in a bunch of progression or combat or even deep narrative. It's a game about exploring a world from the point of view of a cat and it achieves exactly what it sets out to do, no more and no less. And I think that's deserving of the praise it's gotten. All right, short one this time. I'll see you next time. Thanks for coming. Bye.