I am a big fan of Stray! The atmosphere was both haunting and beautiful, and the emotional connection you feel as you guide the cat through puzzles, etc. Hearing about the uncertainty at Annapurna Interactive feels personal a little
I played it with one of my daughers. Lovely father/daughter playing session. Guiding the cat through the maze/puzzles. Cat can't fall, it's just calm and nice.
And then, out of nowhere - blinking screaming wildly stressful and awful rats come chase us.
My daughter dropped the controller, I played it through. But after that the game lost its charm. The second time the rats came, she left. We never played it again.
I checked if there was some "please don't ever give me rats" setting, but nope. I checked with a friend and they said the rats appear throughout the game.
So I'm really sorry, but stray is a 1/10 game for me. Remove the rats and its 9/10.
What is the purpose of the rats? It's an arcade moment in a game that was nice, calm, cute and relaxing. Totally breaks the contract that I felt was established with us as players.
To expand a bit, there's not that many _good_ games where you can explore, follow the story, enjoy a beautiful world and don't need good reflexes or emergency reactions skills.
In particular, gamers with decent skills will praise and give exposure to truly beautiful and well detailed games, and people with little to no action skills won't get past the tutorial.
We can look at it as a fact of life, and expecting all games to be accessible at any skill level is just impossible, but there's a sad part to it when it's so close.
I got my family to play Monument Valley and it was magical. Journey ? they got stuck on the more finicky paths and gave up the controller, while still enjoying the bit they could clear and watched the rest as I played.
Stray was on the same path, where they could probably deal with everything except the few time limited sections. If there was a "no action sequences" switch, it would be truly wonderful.
Also it probably would sting less if there was more games with a path for very low gaming skills.
Monument Valley was awesome!
And I had the exact same experience with Journey - good the first... 10 minutes? Then nope.
The Witness was also wonderful, that one worked. A Monster's Expidition was ok.
+1. This game was adorable and relaxing from beginning to end.
Violence is less of an issue than the tighter action sequence. I got stuck on the elevator bit for a good 15~30 min, and didn't feel much fulfilment from clearing it at the end TBH.
Not every game needs to be accessible, but Stray has so few action sequences, they feel quite unneeded (it would actually be excellent if they could be avoided through sheer cleverness). It reminded me of the random bed scenes in 90s movies.
Lots of people like surprise and excitement. The game is rated: Age 12+ Violence
I'm still hopeful for a "Stray 2" - or whatever they can do now the devs lost the IP. My daughter cried when at the game's ending (no spoiler)