I once heard Polygon.com’s Russ Frushtick say that he wished you could just be a cat in Stray, as opposed to a cat with a robot strapped to its back who does fetch quests for other robots. Frushtick expanded and said he thought the game’s first 45 minutes were its strongest, as you solve light environmental puzzles with your ability to jump, balance, bite, and think your way through and around obstacles. In my mind, the epitome of such gameplay comes when you heft a bucket with your little feline mouth and drop it into a spinning fan to stop the deadly blades and shimmy through, something that could be straight out of the early stages of a game like Playdead’s Inside. However, once you meet and befriend B12, Stray changes. You’re able to store items and communicate with the inhabitants of the Dead City, and this shifts the rhythm of play from a puzzler to more of a linear adventure game.
Russ was onto something, but I’m going to take his query one step further. What if the Danish studio behind beloved atmospheric puzzle games Limbo and Inside had had a chance at telling the story of our orange tabby? What if Playdead developed Stay?
Well, chances are the graphics would be different. We’d likely be side-scrolling instead of working on a three-dimensional plane of movement. The darkness of the setting would fit perfectly into Playdead’s wheelhouse, though, and the puzzle possibilities presented by the movement criteria of a cat as opposed to a human would challenge the studio to push its puzzle design to the next level. Playdead would also likely lean a lot farther toward a sense of real danger and death than BlueTwelve Studio – the actual developers of Stray – decided to. This is where things could get hairy.
Because nobody wants their ineptitude at solving a particular timing puzzle to result in watching a cute little kitty die, much less over and over. That said, I would hope we would say the same about the main character of Inside, a human boy, likely no older than 11 or 12. However, there is particular sensitivity toward violence depicted toward animals in popular media, much more so than toward humans. One could argue that this is the cost of humans starring in the majority of stories that we see, in TV, games, and movies. Writing about this, though, makes me wonder. What does it say that people are more likely to accept seeing a young boy die at the hands of a ruthless machine than witnessing a cat experience the same fate? Have we been desensitized to human death because of the violence we perpetuate with our own actions and/or lack thereof? And the media that we consume? Or does it just make sense because cats are objectively cuter than we will ever be? Something to think about.
So Playdead would have to find out what a game over would look like without having the cat die as dramatically as their previous protagonists. Maybe, if the cat gets overrun by technocrabs, the screen just fades out and you restart at the last checkpoint, and if you miss a jump, you fall out of the frame. Bloodless and elegant. An easy enough fix.
Then, all we’d have to do is come up with how much Playdead would want to incorporate from the story side of what exists in the real game and how they would communicate that in their patented environmentally-driven way. There are no dialogue boxes in Playdead games. No voice overs or any kind of talking whatsoever. Whereas Stray as we know it today is replete with them. I’d be interested to see how much of the current message Playdead would be able to preserve after shifting the game’s primary form of communication, and perhaps how that message would transform based on its new context.
BlueTwelve’s Stray is obviously wonderful. It’s won the hearts of millions, with over 4 million copies sold. It lets you do cat stuff. You can make biscuits on the carpet and turn many trees, lamps, and entryways into scratching posts. There’s an entire button devoted to meowing. But it's a linear story game whose graphical fidelity and cuteness are its main attractions. Meanwhile, Playdead could take the title and turn it into something completely different while preserving the game’s overall vibe. A cat on an ominous adventure in a post-apocalyptic city. I can see it now, delicious tension, glorious puzzle-solving, and all.
Let’s get collaborating, you two!