The video game Stray opens on four cats, in a cave, avoiding the rain — in typical cat fashion. A fly is swatted at, fur is licked and cleaned, and tails are haphazardly flicking. The frame eventually assumes the perspective of the final cat, marking the beginning of your adventure in a dystopian city. While dystopian game worlds are a familiar sight, a cat protagonist is not so common. Stray’s creators Colas Koola and Vivien Mermet-Guyenet display a mastery over this feline perspective, and its unique place in the gaming canon is what drew me, a video game novice — bar-Mario Kart — to the game. Published by Annapurna Interactive, Stray’s cat protagonist was no easy feat. Its production relied upon complex, animated cat models, with 23 real felines credited with its creation. What they give to the game is an authentic and endearing portrayal of our four-legged friends, imbuing each cat with lifelike movement, meows, and personalities.

This commitment to the bona fide cat experience is something of an oddity in video games. What we’ll call ‘scenery cats’ exist in countless game worlds. Twitter account @CanYouPetThatCat highlights a number of these background kitties and outlines rules on whether game designers have allowed players to pet them. Playable cats are a little less common on the other hand, and where they do appear they are often represented as anthropomorphic creatures. Mae, the protagonist of Night in the Woods, is a cat who is a college dropout returning to her hometown. In Blacksad: Under the Skin, the protagonist John Blacksad is a feline Sherlock Holmes, with a cat’s head on a trenchcoat-clad human body. These games present an inauthentic, yet entertaining cat creation — one that employs feline aesthetics, but weighs it down with human features, stories, and personalities that are comparable to our own.

In contrast, Stray’s representation of cats, just as they are, celebrates their agility, elegance, intelligence, curiosity, cheekiness, and playfulness. Sociability would also make its way onto this list if it weren’t for my own cat being the antithesis of it. In an interview with ScreenRant, Swann Martin-Raget, Stray’s producer, said that “portraying them [cats] as realistically as possible was something that really drove us along the way.” Martin-Raget labels the game a love letter to cats from a team made up of approximately 80% cat owners. And that love and experience really shines through, with optional side quests and exchanges such as rubbing against robots’ legs and creating a cacophony of sounds while walking along piano keys capturing the well-trodden cat imaginary.

Unlike the identifiable personas of cat protagonists in many other games, Stray’s cat is simply that: a stray with no name or backstory. It echoes the opening of the Japanese classic 1906 novel I am a Cat by Natsume Sōseki: “I am a cat. As yet, I have no name.” While the novel is narrated by an adopted stray cat who develops a hatred of humans, this common pessimistic view of cats was rectified in Hiro Arikawa’s 2012 novel The Travelling Cat Chronicles. Published over a century after Sōseki’s work, Arikaw’s novel begins identically, but this time introduces the touching relationship between a cat and its owner as they journey across Japan. The contrasting depictions of cats and their relationship to humans reveals a complicated history of tales and beliefs, be they both loved and feared as little mysterious creatures who cannot be claimed or owned.

Conveying their more mystical and godlike character, Stray reminds me of the cats who live at Fushimi Inari in Kyoto, recognised for its array of orange arches. Living up on the mountain, the cats frolic around the stores and shrines, and may even jump into your lap. They’re perplexing and beautiful — disappearing into the tracks and trees then appearing again like tiny — but wise — guardians watching over you. Closer to home, readers may be familiar with the late Redfern Cat, Tiger to his friends, who lived on Abercrombie Street and greeted passing students with a meow and a leg rub, and whose role has been since assumed by the equally ginger Whiskey.

Stray taps into this unique relationship between cats and humans, one defined by fascination and adoration. Media is only starting to recognise that people aren’t satisfied with simply seeing cats; they wish to experience them. Ceyda Torun’s award-winning 2016 documentary Kedi (‘Cat’ in Turkish) follows seven particular stray cats in the streets of Istanbul, each with a name and particular profession, personality, and character traits. TikTok creator @goldshawfarm offers users POV videos of his barn cats living on a duck farm. In seeing the little fluffy paws trotting along fences and across fields, it is freeing to feel as though you are pouncing and bounding around yourself. I’m envious of their daily lives that are both lively and serene, and it is comforting to watch them go about their adventures.
Stray truly is the culmination of humanity’s millenia long obsession with cats. In a world where even Hello Kitty isn’t a cat, Stray shirks persona and artifice, and goes all in on authenticity. While the game’s producer says they never intended to make a “100% cat simulator,” it’s safe to say that to anyone but a cat, they got pretty close.

Stray: “I am a cat. As yet, I have no name.”

Stray taps into this unique relationship between cats and humans, one defined by fascination and adoration.