Hello and welcome to Dominik’s Little Old Purple Column, the 35th of its kind coming to you from post-Christmas Canada where my tofurkey was slowly tofurked over three days. Yay. Theme tune!
STRAY AWAY
Ok so I finished Stray. The game that has been on more Best of 2022 Lists than almost any other game. Or at least any other game where you control a cat. For more details on this and the reasons I didn’t finish it last week please see Dominik’s Little Old Purple Column The 34th Of Its Kind. That has the full-ish frank and funny look at the Cat Sim that isn’t really a Cat Sim, but you will need to be a paid subscriber to access that version of last week’s column podcast because I don’t do this just for a laugh. Well I do. But not in THAT way. The full version each week is five times the free version and it just costs you less than one pound a column podcast and you can cancel at any time so get that Christmas money out, eh?
Sorry. That was a little bit aggressive. I apologise. Bah humbug!
So. Back to Stray. Was it worth finishing?
Well… there is finally a nice little bit of dialogue in there after all the awful writing I wrote about in hopefully unawful writing last week. At one point a main character sacrifices themselves for you so you can escape, and they say something like “it’s not important that we all reach the outside, just that one of us does.” I liked that. That was the closest the game got to a pinch of profundity.
There is also a really tough level involving prison doors you can lock and unlock and need to do with split second timing to lure bad guys in and entrap them. That was challenging. That was well-designed.
But it was a bit too little, too late, and not enough, really. I found it all a bit meh. The end level is ludicrously, pointlessly easy, even for a total crap DadGamer like me. A closing scene attempts to moisten the tearbuds, but it didn’t really connect. Visually the ending is graphically nice but again not really nice enough. I can think of a million better game endings.
They started banging on about a plague as the game closed. I thought I had skipped over a part. No. I checked. There was a bit about the plague at the beginning of the game. In fact, it was pretty much the central plot element. And I had completely forgotten I had been told about it. Now that may not be the game’s fault and more my ADD coupled with brain degeneration. Or it may be the same bad storytelling that for me plagues the whole game.
So why is Stray so popular? Why is it on pretty much every single Best Games of 2022 list? I swear the only reason I can think of is that there are so many cat lovers out there who got a chubby over being able to control a cat.
(PIC Me, a non-cat lover playing Stray while the cat the wife and kids love way more than me watches on.)
I guess it would be how I would react if I there was a game called McAngstAngry where you got to control a Scottish Dad with twin demons of anxiety and aggression. Even if it were an average game, I would give it great reviews because I would be represented in a game in a way I haven’t been before.
So COME ONE, GAME DEVELOPERS! Get cracking with THAT one! And PAID PALS subscribers get cracking with the rest of this week’s podcast which happens after the jump and has me trying another so called Game of 2022, also stuff about car tech, iPhone tech, how I nearly recreated a horror movie, more stuff on the marvellous Marvel Snap and the obligatory toilet tech story. See the rest of you in the free seats next week. Until them keep it little keep it old keep it purple.
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Dominik's Little Old Purple Column #35 FREE TEASER