Stray

Stray casts the player as an ordinary cat that gets lost in an underground cybernetic city inhabited only by robots and must find its way back to the surface. The game combines exploratory platforming with gentle logic puzzles – the cat can jump across ledges, squeeze through narrow gaps, knock items off shelves, or meow to draw the attention of the robotic inhabitants. Along the way the player meets the robot B-12, who becomes a companion and helps with translation and storing collected data, while the story gradually reveals what happened to the city and its inhabitants and why they ended up sealed deep below the surface with no trace of the original human population. Besides the main storyline, the game also offers plenty of side nooks and corners where you can simply prowl the streets, rub against robots, or knock cans off tables, which gives the whole experience an unexpectedly playful, feline dimension.

The atmosphere of city streets steeped in neon lighting is heightened by a striking audiovisual style, where the contrast between rusty ruins and glowing advertisements creates a dense cyberpunk mood, backed by an ambient electronic soundtrack. On Xbox Series X|S the game benefits from fast loading and stable performance, so exploring the tangled streets feels smooth and free of unnecessary frame-rate drops. It originally launched exclusively on PlayStation and PC, arriving on Xbox and Switch a year later, which only heightened expectations among players who had in the meantime read nothing but praise and were eagerly waiting to play it on Microsoft's consoles as well.

On release, Stray earned acclaim mainly for its fresh idea of playing as a cat in a world abandoned by humans and for its sensitive storytelling about identity and loss. It is still cited today as an example of how strongly even a relatively short and mechanically undemanding game can impress through atmosphere and story, and it's among the titles that drew new players to the platform precisely because of its originality and widely shared popularity among cat lovers and sci-fi fans alike.

Why play: Cat lovers and sci-fi fans alike will appreciate Stray's original idea of playing as a cat in a world abandoned by humans, and its sensitive storytelling about identity that still draws new players to the platform today.