Back in June of 2022 Sony decided to change their subscription service in an effort to compete with Xbox gamepass – and that’s probably a smart choice if you ask me. At first i was content with my regular PSN account but then i started browsing the “extra” tier game catalogue and decided what the hell…and so i upgraded to the extra plan. One of the games that switched me over to the extra plan was a game about a cat who ventures through some kind of cyberpunkish world jumping around on platforms and solving puzzles. To be honest, I would never have thought that playing a game where a cat was the main protagonist would even remotely interest me – but I took a leap of faith and decided to try it and man I’m so glad I did.

I’ll be honest, the game does start off a bit slow and at one point i was contemplating if i was even going to continue playing the game after the first 10 minutes of gameplay but something about the game kept me playing – I don’t know what but something in my gut was telling me that this game was going to be special. So after about an hour of gameplay I was totally immersed into the world of Stray. Everything from the environment designs to the NPC interaction and story just sucked me deeper and deeper into this world where all humans are non-existent and society has been replaced with sentient robots. The platforming elements were also a lot fun jumping up alongside buildings, getting into different apartments and snooping around trying to solve different puzzles.

At its heart, Stray is a game of exploration, puzzle solving and deep storytelling and although a short game (took me around 5 hours to complete it) it was worth every minute of gameplay.  I’m not sure if a sequel is in the works but i think it would be cool if the main protagonist for the next installment is a dog – all creatures interact differently within their environment and playing as a different animal in the sequel that continues the storyline from a new animal perspective would be intriguing.

If you haven’t played Stray you owe it to yourself to give it a try…it might just surprise you.