rikard.me/blog/001.txt                                Fri 29 Jul, 2022


                          A Review of Stray


Stray is a mediocre walking simulator.

The dialogue is very lacking.  You are able to prompt dialogue with a
large number of characters, but very few of them actually have any
personality and fewer still are memorable.  You can also show people
items that you have in your inventory to prompt further dialogue, but
all characters share the exact same lines.

Stray lacks the confidence of presenting its story in a completely
non-verbal way, and the dialogue feels cheaply tacked on to cover for
this.  It lacks depth, and struggled to keep me interested.

Exploration is very limited.  You are only able to go where the
designers specifically want you to go.  There's no free-form jumping,
you can only jump to predetermined places.  You can't fall off
buildings or ledges, nor can you fail jumps.  There is no tension, and
the moment-to-moment gameplay fails to feel engaging.

Most sections are on rails.  There are a few areas that lets you
explore more, but most subareas are related to the story, and you're
going to have to explore them and solve their puzzles at some point
anyways.  You are very rarely rewarded for actually exploring.

The few puzzles that exist are incredibly easy, and require little to
no effort to solve.

It's a short chill game, which in itself is not bad, but for a game
that is marketing itself as an adventure game it leaves a lot to be
desired.