The cat is out of the bag, and probably all over your Twitter channel.
“Stray”, a new video game for Sony’s SONY, + 3.42% PlayStation and Microsoft MSFT, + 2.08% Windows, allows players to explore an underground and cyberpunk city like a gingerbread tabby trying to get back to their family.
The $ 29.99 third-person platform adventure and puzzle game from French development studio BlueTwelve and published by Annapurna Interactive has sparked much anticipation since it was first shown during the unveiling event. of PS5 2020. (A more recent trailer released on June 2 has already been viewed more than 1.7 million times on the PlayStation YouTube account.)
And now the long-awaited “cat game” is here, and gamers and their feline friends are already obsessed.
Here are some mild spoilers: The essence of the game is that you play a lost and lost cat navigating an underground city populated by robots. The goal is to return to the world of the surface, where your feline friends live. Your lost one soon joins a sensitive drone called B12 (who can talk to humanoid robots by your cat character) and you two explore the city and solve puzzles to find your way home, finding out what happened to all the humans. along the way, while avoiding the hungry monsters who want to eat this cute kitten almost as much as the players do.
“Stray” was trending on Twitter both Monday and Tuesday, around the game’s release, with more than 363,000 tweets late Tuesday afternoon. And perhaps the most adorable early trend included players posting videos of their own cats being caught by the nameless, leggy protagonist.
Game developers BlueTwelve Studio were not immediately available for comment. But they revealed in a post on the PlayStation blog that they were concerned about making those in the center of the game look and feel like real cats as much as possible. (Well, except to show the cats ’asses, apparently.) And the finished product seems to be resonating with real-life felines and their humans alike.
Some dogs were also entering.
The PlayStation blog post also featured the three cats that inspired the game’s main feline. They include an orange tabby named Murtaugh, a lost old man himself who was found under a car in Montpellier, France. He now lives with the co-owners of BlueTwelve Studio. And a hairless Sphynx named Oscar was the muse of the main cat animator, who is said to have animated cats by hand, not in a motion-capture suit, to clarify the subtleties of a cat’s movements. feline when he runs, jumps, scratches, “boops.” the mucus ”and climbs up. The two cats were regular visitors to the development team’s studio. “Having real cats under our noses throughout development was, of course, very helpful in many ways,” the blog post said.
The real-life rescue cat Murtaugh inspired the feline lead of “Stray.”
BlueTwelve Study
Early reviews of the game have been largely positive: the Washington Post dubbed it a “crumb-foot” and the Virgin called it “one of the best games of the year to date.” But some critics have also said the game doesn’t always “land on your feet,” so to speak, and its charm can quickly fade.
Still, much of the higher praise has been lavished on how the developers captured the feeling of being a cat, by the way those who stray from the game stretch when they get up, rubbing each other with the others, scratch trees or touch bottles indifferently. they pass in front, to the fact that there is a “dedicated meow button.”
Maybe that’s why “Stray” has been like a catnip for players to share on social media, the home of the cat meme. After all, there are millions of cat videos on YouTube, and a search for “cat memes” on Google yields about 198 million results. (In fact, a cat in Japan named Motimaru broke the Guinness World Record for Most Viewed Cat on YouTube last August with 619,586,260 views.)
There are even a growing number of YouTube videos targeting cats (also known as “cat television”), which include images of birds and squirrels to keep cats busy while they are alone at home. Maybe now cat owners can also run the “Stray” loading screen or game opening tutorial for their fur babies.