Those come from avoiding the so-called Zurks, those one-eyed sewer-dwelling rodents that can tear us apart. Locals Coin Crew Games and iam8bit combine forces to release “Escape Academy,” a digital escape room game that puts the emphasis on group play. Whenever our robot musician would play a song, I would instruct the game’s cat to curl up on a pillow and would set the controller down.Įntertainment & Arts Surprise! One of this year’s more delightful video games is an interactive escape room “Stray” encourages us to linger and to enjoy the cat life. The puzzles mostly involve helping the robot denizens of “Stray’s” world - finding sheet music for a busker, or trading electrical cables for a poncho. The game is mostly exploration and puzzle solving as we run around an underground city loosely modeled after Hong Kong’s fortress-like Kowloon Walled City, one where stars are digitized and nearly busted monitors play static-infused images of the outside world. That’s good for us, as playing as a cat in “Stray” is a joy. While there aren’t glimpses of other familiar animals, we take it for granted that cats - the little invasive species with occasional bratty tendencies - are one of the mammals that endured an apocalypse. Whatever effects climate change had, eventually cats survived. We are just an orange cat frolicking in a field with buddies, even at one point rubbing against and licking our black-cat pal. But the game begins with the cutest tutorial I have ever played. Many robots are scared of the outdoors, believing humanity left it uninhabitable before the species died off. These ideas are glanced at rather than hammered into the player’s mindset. The glory of nature, and its preservation - or lack thereof - is a central fixation, as a wrecked environment has led to the creation of one-eyed mutated vermin that eat most everything in their sight, including robotic metal and furry kitty cats. Largely good-natured robots, apparently once designed to be subservient to humans, are torn between following the status quo or taking part in an insurrection. There are hints of a plague that wiped out humanity (thus it’s 2022 topical). The game, available for PlayStation consoles and PCs, nods to bigger-picture ideas. (BlueTwelve Studio / Annapurna Interactive) And yet I can’t recall a game that treats cats, in this case a spry orange feline, with as much reverence as “Stray.” Though bearing a sci-fi dystopian setting, “Stray,” from French firm BlueTwelve Studio, works hard to capture cat movements, cat behavior and cat idiosyncrasies, even down to its themes - a mixture of loyalty, independence and personal rebellion. Cats, those household pets that still double as the king of online memes, have of course been given the video game treatment before - narrative adventure “Night in the Woods” or mobile platform game “Super Phantom Cat” among them.
Other times you can curl up on a robot’s tummy, and its computerized face flashes a digital heart.Sometimes you can just listen to music and sleep.It is a joy to knock things over as a cat.There is a puzzle that involves meowing, and one button on the controller is dedicated solely to meowing.A cat traveling throughout an underground city in a bucket affixed to a rope is as adorable as it sounds.“Stray” was announced in summer 2020, and shortly thereafter it colloquially became known as “the cat game.”Īfter spending nine hours with and completing “Stray” - sorry, the cat game - I can confirm the following:
0 kommentar(er)
