Stray Kids‘ new mini-album, MAXIDENT, has topped this week’s new music poll.
Music fans voted in a poll published Friday (Oct. 7) on Billboard, choosing the South Korean group’s latest project as their favorite new music release of the past week.
MAXIDENT beat out new music by Måneskin (“The Loneliest”), Charlie Puth (Charlie), Ozuna (OzuTochi), Maisie Peters (“Not Another Rockstar”), Quavo & Takeoff (Only Built For Infinity Links), and others.
MAXIDENT follows an already-impressive 2022 for the recent Billboard cover stars. Stray Kids’ Oddinary EP, released in March, was the group’s first release to hit No. 1 on the Billboard 200 albums chart. The octet has also enjoyed sold-out arena concerts across multiple continents over the past year.
“Our goal ever since we debuted was to reach as many ‘stray kids’ as possible,” member Bang Chan previously told Billboard in the group’s recent cover story. He continued, “to deliver our music and give strength to people who really need it.”
“If we settle, we know we can’t go forward,” added Han. “That’s why we were and are like this. We try to look ahead and not stay still.”
MAXIDENT features lead single “Case 143” and sure-to-be STAY favorites such as “Give Me Your TMI,” “Super Board” and the Korean version of “Circus.”
Trailing behind MAXIDENT on the fan-voted poll was Måneskin’s new power ballad “The Loneliest,” with 25% of the vote. Placing third was Puth’s long-awaited self-titled third album, Charlie, with 9% of the vote.
See the final results of this week’s new music release poll below.
The Milky Way galaxy could be a much wetter place than we knew.
A new analysis of exoplanets orbiting red dwarf stars suggests that we may have been missing a population of “water worlds” – soggy planets whose composition consists of up to 50 percent water.
Not all of these worlds will be covered in a global liquid ocean; scientists expect that, for many of them, the water will be bound up in hydrated minerals. However, the finding may have implications for our search for life outside the Solar System.
“It was a surprise to see evidence for so many water worlds orbiting the most common type of star in the galaxy,” says astronomer Rafael Luque of the University of Chicago.
“It has enormous consequences for the search for habitable planets.”
Although we can’t see a single red dwarf with the naked eye, these stars are incredibly numerous. Small, cool, and dim, red dwarfs are, at maximum, only about half the mass of the Sun.
Their low fusion rate gives them the largest longevity of all stars; at 13.8 billion years old, the Universe isn’t old enough for a red dwarf star to have lived out its entire, estimated 100 billion-year lifespan.
An estimated 73 percent of the stellar population of the Milky Way consists of red dwarf stars. Just have a think about that for a moment. When you go out stargazing, in a cool field or atop the flatbed of a truck in the desert on a warm summer night, you can’t even see most of the stars in the sky.
Because they’re so dim and red, finding exoplanets in orbit around red dwarfs is difficult. Just a small percentage of the 5,084 confirmed exoplanets at time of writing have been found around red dwarf stars.
However, our instruments are growing ever more sophisticated – enough so that scientists have been able to characterize dozens of small worlds orbiting these small stars.
There are two main signals scientists look at to characterize an exoplanet. The first is a regular faint dimming of starlight as the orbiting exoplanet passes between us and the star.
The second is a minute lengthening and shortening of wavelengths of light from the star, as the orbiting exoplanet exerts a faint gravitational pull.
If you have these measurements, and know how far away the star is (and therefore how much light it emits), you can measure the radius and mass of the exoplanet – two characteristics from which astronomers can derive the density of an exoplanet.
This density can be used to infer the exoplanet’s composition. A low density is likely to mean an exoplanet with a lot of atmosphere, like a gas giant. A high density is likely to mean a rocky world, like Earth, Venus, or Mars.
Luque and his colleague, astronomer Enric Pallé of the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands and the University of La Laguna in Spain, conducted a density study of 43 exoplanets orbiting red dwarf stars.
Typically, these exoplanets have been separated into two categories: rocky exoplanets and gassy ones with thick atmospheres. But Luque and Pallé saw a curious, third category emerging: exoplanets that are too dense to be gassy, but not quite dense enough to be purely rocky, either.
Their conclusion was that the rock composition of these middle-range exoplanets was mixed in with something lighter… like water, perhaps. But, while it’s tempting to imagine a world teeming with tempestuous seas, these planets are too close to their stars for liquid water on their surfaces.
If their water was on the surface, it would puff up their atmospheres, making them even larger in diameter, and lower in density.
“But we don’t see that in the samples,” Luque says. “That suggests the water is not in the form of surface ocean.”
Instead, these worlds could look something like another object in the Solar System – Jupiter’s moon Ganymede, which is roughly half rock and half water, with the water hidden beneath a rocky, icy shell. Or they could be a bit like the Moon (although significantly wetter), which has water molecules bound up in glass and minerals.
However these worlds have retained their water, if the team’s conclusions are correct, the discovery suggests that these worlds could not have formed where they did. Instead, they would have had to have formed farther from their stars, from rock and ice, and migrated inwards to their current positions.
However, without further evidence, it’s impossible at this stage to make a ruling in favor of this model, one way or another.
“Leaving aside this possibility for discovering alien life-forms,” writes astronomer Johanna Teske of the Carnegie Institution for Science in a related Perspective, “measuring the compositional diversity of planets around red dwarf stars – the most common type of star in the Milky Way – is important for piecing together the complex puzzle of small planets’ formation and evolution.”
NEW YORK (AP) — The virtual cat hero from the new video game sensation “Stray” doesn’t just wind along rusted pipes, leap over unidentified sludge and decode clues in a seemingly abandoned city. The daring orange tabby is helping real world cats as well.
Thanks to online fundraising platforms, gamers are playing “Stray” while streaming live for audiences to raise money for animal shelters and other cat-related charities. Annapurna Interactive, the game’s publisher, also promoted “Stray” by offering two cat rescue and adoption agencies copies of the game to raffle off and renting out a New York cat cafe.
Livestreaming game play for charity isn’t new, but the resonance “Stray” quickly found from cat lovers is unusual. It was the fourth most watched and broadcast game on the day it launched on Twitch, the streaming platform said.
Viewers watch as players navigate the adventurous feline through an aging industrial landscape doing normal cat stuff — balancing on railings, walking on keyboards and knocking things off shelves — to solve puzzles and evade enemies.
About 80% of the game’s development team are “cat owners and cat lovers” and a real-life orange stray as well as their own cats helped inspire the game, one creator said.
“I certainly hope that maybe some people will be inspired to help actual strays in real life — knowing that having an animal and a companion is a responsibility,” said producer Swann Martin-Raget, of the BlueTwelve gaming studio in Montpellier, in southern France.
When Annapurna Interactive reached out to the Nebraska Humane Society to partner before the game’s launch on July 19, they jumped at the chance, marketing specialist Brendan Gepson said.
“The whole game and the whole culture around the game, it’s all about a love of cats,” Gepson said. “It meshed really well with the shelter and our mission.”
The shelter got four copies of the game to give away and solicited donations for $5 to be entered into a raffle to win one. In a week, they raised $7,000, Gepson said, with the vast majority of the 550 donors being new to them, including people donating from Germany and Malta. The company also donated $1,035 to the shelter.
“It was really mutually beneficial,” Gepson said. ”They got some really good PR out of it and we got a whole new donor base out of it.”
Annapurna also bought out Meow Parlour, the New York cat cafe and adoption agency, for a weekend, as well as donating $1,000. Visitors who made reservations could buy “Stray” themed merchandise and play the game for 20 minutes while surrounded by cats. (The game also captivates cats, videos on social media show.)
Jeff Legaspi, Annapurna Interactive’s marketing director, said it made sense for the game’s launch to do something “positively impactful and hopefully bring more awareness to adopting and not shopping for a new pet.”
Annapurna declined to disclose sales or download figures for the game, which is available on PlayStation and the Steam platform. However, according to Steam monitor SteamDB, “Stray” has been the No. 1 purchased game for the past two weeks.
North Shore Animal League America, which rescues tens of thousands of animals each year, said it hadn’t seen any increase in traffic from the game but they did receive more than $800 thanks to a gamer.
In a happy coincidence, the shelter had just set up a profile on the platform Tiltify, which allows nonprofits to receive donations from video streams, the week the game launched. The player channeled donations to the shelter, smashing her initial goal of $200.
“We are seeing Tiltify and livestreaming as this whole new way for us to engage a whole different audience,” said Carol Marchesano, the rescue’s senior digital marketing director. Usually, though, organizations need to reach out to online personalities to coordinate livestreams, which can take a lot of work, she said.
About nine campaigns on Tiltify mention the game “Stray,” the company’s CEO Michael Wasserman said. JustGiving, which also facilitates charity livestreams, said it identified two campaigns with the game.
For his part, Gepson from Nebraska reached out to an Omaha resident who goes by the name TreyDay1014 online to run a charity livestream. Trey, who asked that his last name not be used, has two cats, one of which he adopted from the shelter.
Last week, he narrated to viewers watching live on the platform Twitch as his cat character batted another cat’s tail and danced along railings.
“If I found out my cat was outside doing this, I’d be upset,” Trey said, as his character jumped across a perilous distance. Moments later, a rusty pipe broke, sending the tabby down a gut-wrenching plunge into the darkness.
“That is a poor baby,” Trey said somberly, “but we are okay.”
A $25 donation followed the fall, pushing the amount raised by Trey for the Nebraska shelter to over $100 in about 30 minutes. By the end of four and a half hours of play, donations totaled $1,500. His goal had been to raise $200.
“This has opened my eyes to being able to use this platform for a lot more good than just playing video games,” Trey said.
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AP business writer Matt O’Brien contributed to this report.
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Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and non-profits receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. For all of AP’s philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy.
Stray, a post-apocalyptic adventure game about a cat, is mostly excellent. Two of us at Kotaku recently powered through its puzzles, devouring its dense, mysteriously post-apocalyptic environments and generally enjoying living out the power-fantasy of role-playing a cat. Then we hit the credits. Obviously, we had to talk.
Ari Notis: John, we’ve both finished Stray. Tell me: Did the ending land for you? Or did it…stray from what made the rest of the game so great?
John Walker: I knew we were but a whisker away from a pun. No, I would say my experience of Stray was a straight diagonal line, starting high, and then getting lower and lower until its absolutely terrible ending.
Ari: I’m not quite the same—more of a really high plateau that fell precipitously off a cliff at the end—but I totally agree, that ending is awful. I actually had to warn people IRL: It’s so freakin’ sad!
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John: And yet, I’ve had so many people so furiously tell me off for suggesting the ending entirely forgets THE ENTIRE REASON I WAS PLAYING THE GAME. But I do think a lot of this is an unwillingness to admit that the pretty cat sim had already long become yet another gray third-person robot game, so defenses versus reality are already very high.
Spoilers follow for Stray.
Ari: Ah, yeah, that blog kinda rubbed some people’s fur backwards, didn’t it? But yeah, the whole reason to play Stray is pretty straightforward: You want to reunite the cat with his friends. And you go through all this adventuring—including those robot shooty sections, whose merits we disagree on but in a way that I totally respect your opinion for—only to not even get an inkling that he sees his friends again. It’s a very odd ending for a game that’s otherwise so preoccupied with hope.
John: They’re not even just friends, are they? They’re siblings who love each other. They’re an abandoned litter of kittens, survivors of an apocalypse, and then one of their number falls. That sets up a game that is, of course, uniquely focused on returning to your brothers and sisters. And instead it’s like they just totally forgot. They tangled themselves up in some completely meaningless ignoble sacrifice.
Screenshot: Annapurna / Kotaku
Ari: Yep! For a game about a cat, it got too caught up in the drama around a human. Do you buy that B-12 is really the last living human? And more importantly, did you buy that he’d suddenly turn tail (sorry, sorry, I can’t help it) and decide, in the span of a few minutes, that all trace of humanity isn’t worth continuing?
John: Well, he’s a human consciousness trapped in a machine. This is one small city district, so for all we know there might be millions of humans living happily elsewhere in China, or in Sweden, or Bangladesh, or Australia. And none of this explains the rationale behind his apparent “sacrifice.” He obviously uploads his consciousness to the computer, so there’s no sacrifice anyway, but beyond that, what was his purpose? To release a cat, a creature that has no interest in anything other than itself, back outside, for what? What’s the goal? If it were the end of humanity, as the game wants to imply, he did that so he could…let the cat out?
Ari: Aw, man, no way, the cat definitely has evolved past pure self-interest! (My own cats should take note.) In the prison scene, for instance, he’s escaping with Clementine, and then he’s like, “Meow, meow meow meow, meow,” which translates, I believe, to, “We can’t leave yet. We have to stage a risky operation and rescue my friend B12, who is trapped in this cage guarded by lasers and laser-shooting robots.”
John: I was very confused throughout by whether I was supposed to buy into the cat understanding what B-12 was saying, or as with my own cats, just staring at where the noise comes from, and then hoping there’s food on the way. I played it as a game in which an uninterested cat accidentally keeps happening to flip the right switches, or bump into the right person.
But all this aside, I’d have forgiven any amount of dreadful indulgent faux-sacrifice nonsense if, at the end, my cat had emerged into the bright sunshine to hear, from just off camera, a surprised, “Mew?!” That’s it. That’s all I needed. I didn’t need to see a reunion, to watch them tumble over one another. I just needed to know it was about to happen.
Ari: Exactly! And I kinda get what they were going for, leaving an open-ended finale so as to not neatly tie up the story for the audience. But it just needed the tiniest suggestion that a happy ending could happen—which is what a little “meow” off-screen would’ve accomplished.
John: What’s even weirder is that they DID do such a “Maybe!” ending. Except it was about the bloody human! We got that computer light switching on, which I can only assume was suggesting B-12 was still alive.
Ari: So what’s that mean for the sequel? All robot-shooty parts, no cute cat stuff?
John: I obviously hope they don’t make a sequel. They’re a talented bunch, but Stray revealed they had absolutely no idea what to do with the idea they’d had. I either want to see their next fresh idea, or just focus on making the cat sim everyone really wanted in the first place. God, those microscopic observations they showed near the start. And the joyful moment when the cat first puts on the ridiculous saddle. We had to put one of our kittens in a protective sock after she was spayed, and she did exactly the same, just collapsing like a building was on top of her. To see those details realized so neatly, it was joyful. Which makes an ending about some boring robo-bloke maybe not having killed himself for the stupidest reason ever something of a disappointment.
Ari: Poor kitty! Please tell me you have photos of that.
John:
Photo: Kotaku
Ari: Awwww. But yeah, Stray absolutely nails the feeling of being a cat, right down to waltzing over a keyboard and fucking up people’s chess games and such. And I do think it carries that feeling mostly through to the end. (Even the shooting segments, which went by in a flash in my mind—I actually found myself wishing for an extra chapter or two.) But unlike a real cat, the game did not land on all four legs.
John: Before we wrap up, and you’re wrong about the shooting sections some more, let me tell you how the ending went down in our house: Toby, my 7-year-old, had some friends over, as I was finishing the game on the living room TV. Toby had totally lost interest in the game once it stopped being about being a cat, but wanted to be there for the reunion. As it was clear the game was about to let me outside, I said to him, “Toby, what do you think’s about to happen?” He sat up, “The kittens!” And so we all watched for the inevitable, glorious moment… And there was just nothing. And we looked at each other in shock. It was just so flagrantly awful. And Toby continued to lament this oversight for days after. And when a 7-year-old is critiquing your story structure, you know something’s wrong.
“Stray,” the video game about a nameless feral cat wandering through a city of robots, is one of the summer’s biggest surprise hits. Now, some players are modifying the game to add their own feline friends to its post-apocalyptic world.
Mods — short for modifications — are fan-made alterations to a video game that are done by rewriting or changing the game’s files. The simplest mods make cosmetic changes, such as changing the texture on a weapon to look nicer. But mods can also be wildly ambitious, sometimes ballooning into entirely new games. 2021’s “The Forgotten City,” an adventure set in ancient Rome, was originally a “Skyrim” mod.
On NexusMods, a site that hosts downloadable mods, there are already a number of options available to players seeking to change the look of “Stray’s” furry hero with different coats and eye colors. The site is flush with options for black cats, gray tabbies, calicoes and more, each already downloaded hundreds of times.
Review: ‘Stray,’ a game in which you play as a cute cat, is a meow-sterpiece
Many of the modders who made those skins based them off their own cats. One creator added their green-eyed tuxedo cat, Maro, to “Stray.” The download page includes a real-life photo reference for maximum accuracy. Hi, Maro!
Another user, Narwhix, uploaded a mod to let gamers play as Sunny, their adorable calico. A blurry picture of the cat glaring down at the camera can be found on the listing.
Some modders have started taking requests from interested players. NexusMods user NorskPL, for example, created retextures of the “Stray” cat matching specifications shared by fellow users, and created a beginner’s tutorial for anyone interested in making their own cat mod. Another NexusMods user, Hacktix, uploaded skins of Sushi, Lilly, Luna and Buffy (all cats) in response to commissions from users.
For players looking for something more offbeat, there are also modifications that turn the nameless “Stray” hero into an adorable puppy or the lasagna-loving cartoon cat Garfield. One mod transforms Carl “CJ” Johnson, the protagonist of “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas,” into a terrifying but nonetheless playable cat.
There are also mods that add quality-of-life improvements to “Stray,” such as button remapping, higher graphics settings, localizing the game’s language into Thai and a very rudimentary split-screen multiplayer mode. You can even modify the game’s six badges, a collectible players can find that are displayed on the cat’s harness, into pride pins.
“Stray,” released to near-unanimous praise from critics and fans, nails the feeling of being a cat — an unusual selling point for a video game. With its growing popularity, expect to see even more mods in the future, bringing all sorts of cute cat characters to virtual life.
Stray is an adorable new game about a cat exploring a post-apocalyptic future full of robots, and now, you can play through the whole thing as the laziest, chillest cat of them all: Garfield.
A new mod by modder Chris Rubino replaces the cat in Stray with a surprisingly believable rendition of Garfield of comics fame, right down to the lazy expression and chubby cheeks. That’s it, that’s all it does – no lasagna or Odie or Lorenzo Music voice, just the good old Garfield wandering around a robot city, fending off Zurks, and probably getting into more trouble than Garfield himself ever could at Jon Arbuckle’s house.
For me, the best part of this mod is the deep expression of total ennui on his face:
Stray – Garfield Mod Screenshots
It’s no surprise that Garfield has entered Stray given that the original kitty is an orange tabby just like him, but other modders have taken it even farther already. There’s a weird mod you can add that replaces Stray’s meowing action with the sound of Heavy Rain protagonist Ethan Mars calling for his lost son. And delightfully, a number of modders are jumping on a new trend of making the cat in Stray look like their own cats at home.
Even though we reviewed a version of Stray sans Garfield, we still found it to be a “delightful cat-based adventure in a cyberpunk world worth exploring.” If you’re picking it up for the first time, there are a number of wonderfully cat-like things you can do in Stray’s world, and IGN has a full wiki guide to help you through from start to finish.
Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.
If you’ve felt uncomfortable about the rice paddy hats in Stray, you aren’t the only one. Stray lifts Asian aesthetics to evoke exoticism and danger, but it doesn’t engage with the history of the city it appropriates. This is especially problematic because its real-world setting carries painful historical baggage that can’t be reduced to neon signs and cramped apartments.
With more than three million people per square mile (which is 47 times more densely populated than Manhattan), the Walled City was the most densely packed city in world history. The streets were lit by neon signs because the buildings didn’t allow much natural light to filter in from above. The developers of Stray told USA Today that the Walled City of Hong Kong was “the perfect playground for a cat.” The artists at BlueTwelve Studios were inspired by how the real-life city was “organically constructed and was filled with details and interesting points of view,” such as the air conditioning units and exposed pipes. And they weren’t the only ones who admired the environment. Photographers and architects lauded the ingenuity in the ways people lived without safety codes or a centralized government.
But that organic construction came about for painful historical reasons. The Walled City was originally a Qing dynasty era military base. It became a separate enclave from British-controlled Hong Kong after China was weakened by the Sino-Japanese War. Japan, China, and Britain all tried to lay claim to the Walled City throughout its history. To ease international tensions, both China and Great Britain eventually gave up trying to govern the Walled City after the end of World War II. The ensuing lawlessness fermented organized crime and opium dens. The Triad gangs turned the enclave into “the epicenter of Hong Kong’s narcotics trade.” None of this context is particularly apparent when you explore the dusty streets of Walled City 99.
Jessie Lam, a video game concept artist whose family originates from Hong Kong, explains, “[The Walled City] was this super packed city block full of crime and destitution—thanks triads—-that it took decades until it was finally demolished. We don’t talk about the highrise coffin sized apartment rooms these days…There is a muted anger there.”
The history of the Walled City is inextricably tied to colonial rivalries, but none of it is represented in Stray. In the game, the city was a shelter built to protect humans from the plague. The only sentient beings left are self-aware robot “Companions” who have built their own society in humanity’s absence. I later appreciated their charming personalities, but when I first met these robots, my first thought was: “Why are they wearing rice paddy hats?”
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Screenshot: Annapurna Interactive
Conical rice hats have a troubled history within the Asian diaspora community. They’re used as a racial shorthand to indicate Asian origins, regardless of the actual context. Clothing retailer Abercrombie and Fitch, for example, once used images of Chinese men in rice paddy hats in its product line. While the existence of farmer hats is not offensive by itself, it becomes astoundingly racist when used in unrelated imagery, such as a racist parody of a laundry business. Protests and angry letters forced Abercrombie and Fitch to pull the offensive t-shirts from their stores.
Thankfully, Stray meets the bare minimum of not racist language to describe the robots (even if its gratuitous use of the Japanese language in fictional Hong Kong is a bit eyebrow-raising). But the game’s rampant appropriation of Asian history and culture needs to be supported by care in design and implementation. Singapore-based Alexis Ong wrote an excellent Polygon article about Stray’s accuracy to Hong Kong, while others like Lam are less impressed by how the game portrayed the Walled City.
“The graffiti and signage is a huge question mark. Anything in English is clearly player facing but [in-game], who would those tags be for?” Lam told Kotaku. “It’s one thing if it’s robots passing messages to each other but some overlap each other instead of being written around each other. Which calls into question if said developers also understand graffiti culture and the etiquette. But also…Why deliberately make some robots wear rice hats? When there’s clearly no way to go outside or anywhere in game to farm?” Headwear such as baseball hats have become ubiquitous to urban fashion, which could explain the companions copying this style, but rice hats have not. These conical hats have been used to denote Asianness in western media, and Stray cannot separate itself from this history.
Since this comes up every time I write a blog about Asian representation: No, I don’t believe that BlueTwelve Studios is intentionally racist. Nor do I think that the resulting game is the worst offender when it comes to cultural appropriation. Its foibles are typical of the cyberpunk genre as a whole. Cyberpunk originates from America’s anxieties about Japan’s economic dominance, but cyberpunk media is often reluctant to populate their cities with Asian characters. I felt the same sense of alienation while I played Stray.
I’m sure that the developers weren’t gleefully rubbing their hands together when they decided not to implement any human characters. But Walled City 99 was yet another cyberpunk city in which people like me weren’t welcome. Not unless I was a robot in a conical hat. And that doesn’t sit well with me either. “Asian Robot” is a Hollywood troupe that frequently dehumanizes Asian people (Ex Machina, Cloud Atlas, The Matrix). There’s even a genre name for it: Techno-orientalism. In these works, Asia is expressed through “an aesthetic sensibility rather than by representing or centering actual Asian characters.” Stray falls squarely within this genre.
Screenshot: Annapurna Interactive
“[There’s] lots of the same general ideas being recycled a lot across projects and sometimes that extends into the cyberpunk genre,” Lam told Kotaku over Twitter messages. “The orientalism as a whole isn’t new.”
I just wanted to play a cute cat game without the techno-orientalism. Unfortunately, Stray does not interrogate its creative influences at all. And from the moment that the developers decided to base their game off an enclave that was created by British colonialism, they had a responsibility to grapple with its history. Stray takes so much care in how it represents cats. I just wish it was as consistent about real humans’ legacies.
Because Stray is out on PC, there are already mods for the game, and because Stray is a game about cats, a lot of those mods are focusing on that.
We’ve featured some here already, like one that lets you change the colour of the playable cat, but this one by Sirgalahad172 is a little less subtle. It takes the cat and replaces it with, as is now custom, CJ from Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
The creator says “this mod is intended as a joke as cj needs to be modded in any game that exists XD”, which is fair enough, but I actually really like the story-telling possibilities here. I’ve seen people describe CJ’s stilted appearance here as “horrific” online, but I prefer to think of this—and his other modded appearances—as some wild GTA side mission where CJ is cursed by an evil wizard, and is doomed to spend eternity drifting through other video game genres, experiencing everything they offer that San Andrea’s sprawling landscape does not.
If you want to install the mod yourself you can get it here, but just know that the first few minutes of the game might be a little unsettling, as all the cats from the intro share the same model as the player, so they’ve got CJ’s new body, but not his textures.
While we’re on the subject of swapping the cat out with other animals, here’s another example, even if it’s not strictly a mod. Instead of modifying Stray, this video was actually made in Dreams on the PlayStation 5, and replaces the nimble little ginger cat with…a clomping big horse. Which would make it harder to do all the platforming stuff, I guess, but might also make dealing with the Zurks easier since you could just kick them in the face.
My colleagues have been playing Stray on PS5 and by all accounts it has been an absolute joy. I, however, have been playing on PC, where things aren’t quite as rosy.
It’s not a disaster; even on my middling PC I can run it perfectly at 4K and 60FPS, which is always appreciated, and of course it looks amazing most of the time, but throughout the game I’m being hit with instances of annoying little stutters that aren’t bad enough to torpedo the experience, but are just bad enough to remain a thorn in my side.
As always happens with PC performance woes I was wondering whether that was just me or if the problem was more widespread. Turns out it’s very widespread. Like, it’s affecting pretty much everyone.
The culprit, as Digital Foundry explain below, is a familiar one for PC gamers: it’s Unreal Engine 4’s shader compilation, an issue that feels like it is increasingly plaguing every game that is developed on the engine these days. On consoles, which are pre-built and standard across the board, developers are able to precompile a game’s shaders, meaning anyone playing the game on PS5 won’t suffer from this.
But because every PC is different, developers are never afforded that luxury on the platform (with some rare exceptions, like the recent Horizon port), and so most games are forced to compile shaders on the fly.
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The result is a constant stream of micro-stutters, which over the course of hours of gameplay can start to get kinda annoying! The video below (which provides some examples) goes into a lot of detail about this, and I’ve set it to autoplay at the part about PC performance, but if you want to see how the PS4 and PS5 editions fared, you can can see them earlier on as well.
Stray PS5 vs PS4/PC: A Superb 4K 60FPS Rendition on PS5 – But What’s Up With PC?
There’s a lot of buzz about Stray right now, by dint of its coming out during a pretty dry patch for new releases, and more importantly, how you get to play as an incredibly cute cat. Unfortunately, what I think a lot of people are about to discover this week, is that it very quickly forgets about that, and turns incredibly…gamey. I was not expecting to be playing as a robot, zapping mutant blobs, for instance.
The following contains spoilers for Stray’s game elements (how you play, rather than why you do it), without getting into the story itself at all.
Stray’s opening is just wonderful. Without any fussy nonsense, no tiresome cutscenes, the camera gently swoops over four kittens living in the overgrown remains of a dam, before settling behind the ginger critter of the collection, and gives you control. The first thing you do is interact with your brothers and sisters, each a gorgeous moment of beautifully observed kitty behavior. The animations are perfect, and anyone of any decency will be awwing at the screen.
Screenshot: BlueTwelve Studio / Kotaku
After a little sleep, the four cats head off on a journey, crossing the ruins of what was once an enormous structure, jumping from concrete block to massive pipe, trotting down railings, and poking about in a very cat-like fashion. It’s only when you follow your three siblings onto one large pipe that a cutscene kicks in, and Ginger (as I’m calling him) scrabbles, slips, then falls far, far below. It’s genuinely traumatic!
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Waking up in what looks like a sewer pipe, Ginger is injured, walking with yet another superbly observed limp, before falling down and resting some more. At this point your kitten feels so vulnerable, so fragile, and as a player it’s imperative to do everything you can to keep the little guy safe.
This is clearly set in some sort of future, post-human by the looks of things, with the rusting remains of robots found on your path. Then, in glimpses at first, you see some rather unpleasant pink-blob creatures that feel like they’d be more at home in Inside. They scurry away, however, so you can carry on your kitty way, jumping and dashing about, looking for safety, and as a player, desperately wondering how you’ll reunite the little guy with his family.
Then you find the flying robot. Now, this isn’t quite as daft as it sounds, given that as a cat in a world seemingly only lived in by AI lifeforms, you’d otherwise struggle to communicate. B-12, your robot companion, appears to be able to speak to cats and robots alike, and also possesses the astonishing ability to “digitize” physical objects, then rematerialize them when needed. So yeah, he’s a talking inventory.
Stray, at this point, becomes a game about a cat in an underground robot city, helping out the locals with their menial tasks. And, even here, I’m cool. You’re still—albeit now wearing an enormous robo-saddle—a cat, and while I’ve yet to meet the cat that would willingly help anyone to do anything, it’s still fun to play. Your role is really never more than finding third-person platform routes to a destination, and jumping about the sprawling city areas offers you a great deal of freedom. Even the ability to roleplay as a cat, which is to say: ignoring your tasks and just finding cool places to sleep.
It starts to push credulity here at around the one-hour mark of its five or six hours, as you’re optionally gathering sheet music for a robot to play on a guitar, and seeking out “memories” for your amnesiac robo-chum by looking at floaty pixel patterns, and trying to find enough cans of energy drink to buy objects from a shop…Yeah, yeah, I know, it’s already collapsed into gamey game-game nonsense, but as I say, you do all this by pratting around as a kitten.
It’s after that lengthy section, just over halfway, that I’d say Stray abandons almost all notions of being a cat-sim, and just descends into every other third-person action game.
Screenshot: BlueTwelve Studio / Kotaku
You help a robot find the equipment he needs to complete a weapon that can take on the Zurks. These are the preposterously-named alien-like blobs that have apparently mutated into existence at some point since the death of humanity. The further you progress, the more of the fleshy webbing you see strung through tunnels and on the sides of buildings, taking this cutesy cat-me-do into a realm of visceral horror motifs that feels so weirdly incongruous. These grow eggs, the eggs spawn Zurks, and you have to murder them up with a purple light.
It’s L1 to fire the light beam, emitted from B-12 hovering above your cat body, at which point there’s really no pretense that you’re controlling anything other than the machine. And you’re zapping what may as well be aliens. In gray corridors. Can you see the issue?
Later still, this moves on to running away from enemy drones, who cast a net of blue light before them. Cross into it and it switches green, then if you stay too long it’s red and they start firing bullets at you. Bullets, fired from floating drones, in gray ruins…
I’m dumbfounded by this. How did a game that was so wonderfully good at giving us a kitty-cat to play as, with such precise and delightful observations of kitten behavior, find itself in this place? It’s certainly not because it was wanting for anything.
Screenshot: BlueTwelve Studio / Kotaku
I would have been delighted if it just carried on as it began for its five or six hours. Just being a cat, exploring an abandoned city, looking for routes through the remains. Maybe I’d need to find a drink here and there, and perhaps I–as the player–could piece together something of the history of the place, to the cat’s obvious indifference. Heck, if it desperately needed to go sci-fi, maybe I would stumble on surviving computers and traps, something to evade in a cat-like way. Honestly, I’d have ditched the robots entirely, since their real role is to present fetch quests. But even keeping them, it didn’t need to slide so far down the slippery slope to gametown.
I won’t even get into how much I hated the ending. That can be for another day. Let’s just say my son is still furious about how awful it was two days later. It really encapsulated how much the game had abandoned the lovely place it started in, and if you’ve completed the game, you’ll know exactly what I mean.
Stray could have been just magical from start to finish. Instead, it’s magical at the start, then slowly collapses into the gray roboty mire of Most Other Games. At the start, I’d been roleplaying! I was meowing at locked doors, deliberately going in the wrong direction to explore nooks and crannies, haughtily ignoring a pressing task to find a place to nap. By the end I’d almost entirely forgotten I was a cat, and may as well have been a spaceship for all the difference it made. And that sucks.
