I’ll fess up: I get on just well and hoopshod being a killjoy. While I approach my exaction from each novel expeditionary launch with the hope that I will find in any freshly graven book, album, film, walk-about-the-towers-of-my-town a legitimately profound, paradigm shifting encounter that restructures my understanding of art or life and how to live it (hopeful for such to an almost naive degree), I do not shrug the burdensome package saddling artistic impropriety that attempts underwhelmingly, weighted by any artist’s flagging ambitions or abilities taking in rankle the brushing of their work with gaudy baubles of shallow ephemera, to usher the aggravating notion that I should praise the deadening of our fierce human scar-tissue, repudiating all billable operations for the conscious reevaluation of consciousness.
Stray coming into being as an immediately memetic ideal of gaming (in a way that presents as, for the internet age, platonically formed to the critical mind inebriated with Schroedinger’s irony), something which is iconographically refutational of the major visual trends dominating photorealistic 3D rendered games without defrauding on the style as something unattainable to the indie domain, and perspectively invocated from a viewpoint which does not repossess the player’s real-world innate powerlessness for (even in “hard” games or “disempowered” games like Elden Ring or Alien: Isolation) an exchange towards defaulted and ceiling encumbered play joists. It is less of an absurd notion of fixation to play as a cat, see Night in the Woods/Skyrim/Sonic/Gato Roboto, than it is to play as a cat that is experientially empathetic; in trend for character, PCs are formatted to instill a sympathy of role-play with regards to tippling of the siphonable aspects of what is aped so that a specific tonic of drunkenness forms in the player off of whichever flavour is aped (and with cats, it’s usually unarmed damage +10). So for a game to say, “here, understand this cat’s world through eyes which conform only to what is feasible for a cat” is worth noting and maybe even accepting into study.
A outset which is conceptually strong though can in no way further stake equal thematic, idealistic, holistical, or creative strength in kind without a greater degree of post empathetic play rhetoric, and this is what Stray ultimately fails to achieve. It is a game which rests the concept of cat = player on the lifelike animations of its model, on the minor ‘nuisances’ of scratching, sleeping, knocking over of things, on the lack of inexplicable and grandiose desire from the outset to completion. Greater intent is placed on as sympathetically affecting empathy through the accoutrement of the emotion than in reinforcing the emotion on terms that are fundamentally instigated from the human element of the simulation first; as has been said, would the game be of interest were the PC not a cat/this is a game in which a cat accomplishes a human goal. What these criticisms detail is the disconnect between the dev desires to explore a concept (which is done well: no review fails to mention how you ‘feel’ like a cat, just as you feel like Batman or feel like you’re stranded on a hostile island in other games) while not equipping themselves, or not being able to do adequately in their writing boundaries, explore the themes or ideas presented in the mutualized presentations of post-corporate landfill and c a t. If this game was less satisfied with making sure tail twitches were cute to the player and more intent on discovering the elements of this world’s hostility towards its wildlife and hostility of presence, it would be a first step beyond the conceptual to the richly artistic.
Just a quick last word on this as well, because it doesn’t dovetail super well into my previous point, but world aesthetics, affective aesthetics. and effective aesthetics all work on different levels, something which this game really poorly navigates in my opinion. The bluntest way these differences in rendered form most often approximate is in architecture and texture wrapping, in order: borrowed or created floorplans from Gothic/neo-modern/corporate etc. architecture or costuming manufactured with relics of Mod/Punk/High-society etc.;walls which contain ambient world information or set dressing relegated to character information; accumulations of waist height ‘detritus’ mazing a floor plan of any given room or divet. Stray tried to insulate its world with mostly the first, but due to a lot of reasons stemming from its rigid exploration mechanics, poor straddling of ‘you are a cat but you need to go somewhere human’ conception of the world (can you imagine if the world design was formed similar to Little Nightmares? God, that would be lovely), and lack of true emotional depth from the complexity/desire of its cast, the world is largely populated with the last: effective aesthetics. It’s not that the world doesn’t look good or impressively rendered, it’s that it plays very well like a minimally viable product, or rather, like something which facilitates origin and destination based travel and facilitation between these two parts. In a world which is meant to be seen through a cat’s eyes, I would hope for a strangeness and aimlessness to be more obviously rendered in a world that is less air conditioners and more horribly frightening hot/cold window boxes.
Stray coming into being as an immediately memetic ideal of gaming (in a way that presents as, for the internet age, platonically formed to the critical mind inebriated with Schroedinger’s irony), something which is iconographically refutational of the major visual trends dominating photorealistic 3D rendered games without defrauding on the style as something unattainable to the indie domain, and perspectively invocated from a viewpoint which does not repossess the player’s real-world innate powerlessness for (even in “hard” games or “disempowered” games like Elden Ring or Alien: Isolation) an exchange towards defaulted and ceiling encumbered play joists. It is less of an absurd notion of fixation to play as a cat, see Night in the Woods/Skyrim/Sonic/Gato Roboto, than it is to play as a cat that is experientially empathetic; in trend for character, PCs are formatted to instill a sympathy of role-play with regards to tippling of the siphonable aspects of what is aped so that a specific tonic of drunkenness forms in the player off of whichever flavour is aped (and with cats, it’s usually unarmed damage +10). So for a game to say, “here, understand this cat’s world through eyes which conform only to what is feasible for a cat” is worth noting and maybe even accepting into study.
A outset which is conceptually strong though can in no way further stake equal thematic, idealistic, holistical, or creative strength in kind without a greater degree of post empathetic play rhetoric, and this is what Stray ultimately fails to achieve. It is a game which rests the concept of cat = player on the lifelike animations of its model, on the minor ‘nuisances’ of scratching, sleeping, knocking over of things, on the lack of inexplicable and grandiose desire from the outset to completion. Greater intent is placed on as sympathetically affecting empathy through the accoutrement of the emotion than in reinforcing the emotion on terms that are fundamentally instigated from the human element of the simulation first; as has been said, would the game be of interest were the PC not a cat/this is a game in which a cat accomplishes a human goal. What these criticisms detail is the disconnect between the dev desires to explore a concept (which is done well: no review fails to mention how you ‘feel’ like a cat, just as you feel like Batman or feel like you’re stranded on a hostile island in other games) while not equipping themselves, or not being able to do adequately in their writing boundaries, explore the themes or ideas presented in the mutualized presentations of post-corporate landfill and c a t. If this game was less satisfied with making sure tail twitches were cute to the player and more intent on discovering the elements of this world’s hostility towards its wildlife and hostility of presence, it would be a first step beyond the conceptual to the richly artistic.
Just a quick last word on this as well, because it doesn’t dovetail super well into my previous point, but world aesthetics, affective aesthetics. and effective aesthetics all work on different levels, something which this game really poorly navigates in my opinion. The bluntest way these differences in rendered form most often approximate is in architecture and texture wrapping, in order: borrowed or created floorplans from Gothic/neo-modern/corporate etc. architecture or costuming manufactured with relics of Mod/Punk/High-society etc.;walls which contain ambient world information or set dressing relegated to character information; accumulations of waist height ‘detritus’ mazing a floor plan of any given room or divet. Stray tried to insulate its world with mostly the first, but due to a lot of reasons stemming from its rigid exploration mechanics, poor straddling of ‘you are a cat but you need to go somewhere human’ conception of the world (can you imagine if the world design was formed similar to Little Nightmares? God, that would be lovely), and lack of true emotional depth from the complexity/desire of its cast, the world is largely populated with the last: effective aesthetics. It’s not that the world doesn’t look good or impressively rendered, it’s that it plays very well like a minimally viable product, or rather, like something which facilitates origin and destination based travel and facilitation between these two parts. In a world which is meant to be seen through a cat’s eyes, I would hope for a strangeness and aimlessness to be more obviously rendered in a world that is less air conditioners and more horribly frightening hot/cold window boxes.
SOLERO
1 year ago