Beaten: Stray (PS4)

Stray is an amazing new game where the player guides a normal cat around a ruined city that is only occupied by the robots that the humans left behind. It's the cutest post-apocalypse I've ever seen in a game and almost every minute of playing it is a joy. In spite of the temptation to drop hundreds of cat puns into this review, I will abstain because it's too easy and I bet every other review is doing it.

At its core this is a puzzle game, with the player using the cat's natural abilities to solve puzzles and avoid dangers. Thankfully, they did not make it a platform game as well, because a cat's natural ability to jump shouldn't be hindered by the player's own clumsiness. When an opportunity to jump is there, an X appears letting the player know that the jump is available and that's it. When exploring the challenge is to look around for places you can jump to and this option for jumping prevents endless "nope, can't make that jump" deaths.

The cat encounters an underground ruined city with no people left, only their robots who sadly just kept on keeping on, mimicking human activities like street musicianing and bartending as a sad sort of memorial to their lost creators. The cat then encounters a human intelligence in a small drone that wants to work with it and straps itself on its back with a backpack so the game can kick into high gear.

The drone helps translate writing and solve puzzles for the rest of the game, while the cat does the heavy lifting, and most fun of all, causes cat-chaos to keep the story moving along. Exploration of the environment is a big part of the game, too, and doing things like scratching up the curtains until they fall and open access to a window is an extension of the natural cat behaviors the game presents.

It's a short game but very satisfying and not very difficult. After spending five months in Dying Light 2, Stray was a refreshing gaming intermezzo of absolute cuteness, but in a way it's so good the player can't help but want more. Reviews and sales seem good, so I expect a sequel in the next few years that really expands on that world, without going all Ubisoft-thousand-points-of-light on it.