Stray (video game)

Stray is a Cyberpunk adventure game developed and published by indie developer BlueTwelve Studios and published by Annapurna Interactive in 2022 for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5. The game follows an unnamed tabby cat as it is separated from its colony and stumbles upon a dystopian city inhabited by robots and mutants known as Zurks, which are known to eat both organic and even metallic matter. Guiding the stray is a small drone known as B-12, who helps the cat with its journey back to the surface in hopes of reuniting with its family.

Development of the game began in 2015, under the newly-formed BlueTwelve Studio founded by Colas Koola and Vivien Mermet-Guyenet—known as Koola and Viv, respectively—who set out to create an independent project after working for Ubisoft Montpellier. The game's dystopian setting was also inspired by the famed Kowloon Walled City, whose favela-like structure and culture surrounding it spawned countless works of fiction.

Tropes used in Stray (video game) include:

After the End: Humanity is long gone, having been decimated by a plague prior to the events of the game, leaving just faint memories to the robots left behind.
Ambiguous Gender: The cat's gender is never specified, though it is likely to be male as ginger cats are more often than not male.
Amnesiac Hero: B-12, having its memories corrupted due to its dormancy. Helping it reconstruct its memories forms part of the plot.
Amplified Animal Aptitude: The cat appears to be quite intelligent for its species, having at least some rudimentary grasp of technology and ability to solve complex problems.
Bag of Holding: B-12 is able to digitise physical items into the cat's inventory stored in its backpack.
Brain Uploading: B-12 was a human scientist all along, who vainly attempted to upload their consciousness into a suitable robot body prior to the cat's arrival.
Call a Human a Meatbag: Humans are referred to as "soft ones" by the robots who survived and evolved in their creators' absence.
City in a Bottle: City 99 is completely isolated from the outside world. Most of the robots consider the "Outside" to be little more than a fairy tale.
Creator Cameo: B-12 is named after developer BlueTwelve Studio's logo.
Cyberpunk: Besides being compared to Kowloon's Walled City, City 99's neon-bathed streets also reminded people of Night City from Cyberpunk 2077.
Extreme Omnivore: The Zurks, who are able to eat everything from organic matter to even metal. It was later discovered that they were engineered to be as such for waste disposal purposes, only for such experiments to go horribly wrong.
Great Wall: Great Walls seem to have been de rigeur for cities in the world of Stray, to the point that the cities are no longer named and are just called "Walled City X". Unlike most other great walls, these include an irising roof that can completely seal off the city from the rest of the world.
Ink Suit Actor: The cat protagonist is modelled after Murtaugh, one of the founders' cats who was an actual stray they rescued off the streets of Montpellier.
No Name Given:
- Being a feral cat whose only other family is a colony of fellow strays, it goes unnamed. The stray is however modeled after a real cat rescued by BlueTwelve's co-founders though, whom they christened as Murtaugh.
- B-12 goes by this name because it's what's written on the body it's currently in. Their human name has since been lost to history, however.
The Plague: References to an unspecified pandemic which wiped out all of humanity are strewn throughout the walled city.
Schizo-Tech: Despite being set centuries after humanity's extinction in the distant future, the general aesthetic is still that of the late 80s to the mid 90s, as evidenced by CRT televisions and beige-box tower PCs with optical and floppy drives, mechanical hard disks strewn around hackerspaces and so on.
Was Once a Man: B-12 used to be a human scientist, but was unable to recall any such memories of being one prior to their consciousness being uploaded into a drone.