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In this episode, James and Alec discuss their playthroughs of Stray on Steam (PC) and Steam Deck. Recorded April of 2023 Another Podcast group was mentioned during this episode and we couldn’t think of the name at the time. The podcast in question was The Good The Bad and The Backlog. Be sure to check them out!
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In this episode, James and Alec discuss their playthroughs of Stray on Steam (PC) and Steam Deck. Recorded April of 2023 Another Podcast group was mentioned during this episode and we couldn’t think of the name at the time. The podcast in question was The Good The Bad and The Backlog. Be sure to check them out!
Listen to Episode 004_Stray by 321Backlog! MP3 song. Episode 004_Stray song from 321Backlog! is available on Audio.com. The duration of song is 01:42:13. This high-quality MP3 track has 717.162 kbps bitrate and was uploaded on 1 Jun 2023. Stream and download Episode 004_Stray by 321Backlog! for free on Audio.com – your ultimate destination for MP3 music.
The transcription is a conversation between two friends discussing the game "Stray" and their experiences playing it. They talk about the gameplay mechanics, the accessibility of the game, and their overall enjoyment of it. The game follows a cat navigating a post-apocalyptic city filled with robots. They mention that the game has received positive reviews and recommend playing it with a controller. The conversation also touches on other topics such as the protagonist being a cat, the use of motion capture with a real cat, and the inclusion of cat behaviors in the game. Overall, they both highly recommend "Stray" and consider it a great game. Who brought this to the backlog? Was it me? It was your game, yeah. I don't remember because I know we did, like, I looked on your list and you looked on mine, I think. So, all right, you want to jump into it? Yeah, just proceeding. What is the word after proceed, afterwards? Is it proceed? Succeeding? I think it would technically be proceeding. Yeah, I'll just talk like I talk, I'm not going to tell anyone. I'm not a smart guy. Three, two, one, back to the launcher. Did you see there's a new season of Sweet Tooth? What is Sweet Tooth? The movie, the show on Netflix with the little boy that's like half deer. That was called Sweet Tooth? Yeah, but you liked it. I never saw it. You didn't see it? No, there was one where it was like this kid deer or something, like half deer, and I thought it was called something different. Yeah, it's called Sweet Tooth because he's like addicted, he loves eating sweet stuff. And then he gets like this big, there's like a big dude that helps him, who like, he hunts them, but he ends up helping them for some reason, because I think they can talk. You watched it, right? I did not watch it. You would love it. Dude, you would love the show, you need to watch it. Ending podcast, go watch the show. I feel like you'd really like that show, I feel like it's an Alex show for sure. Yeah, I'm going to write it down right now. It's like post-apocalypse and stuff, and these kids were born half animal or something like that, and this started around the time everyone started getting sick and dying, I guess. So they were blamed for it. Interesting. Yeah, so there's people that hunt them, I think, for specific reasons that they reveal in the show. But yeah, there's like a kid who is half deer or something like that, and a guy finds him. It's a really good show. Yeah. It was good, man, I think you'll like it. I can't believe you haven't seen it. I feel like we talked about it and you said you liked it. I think my wife tried watching it, or did watch it, and maybe I came by the room or something while she was watching it. I'm not 100%. Yeah. But you said it's on Netflix? Yep, it's just second season just came out. I am writing it down right now. Put it on the show notes, you'll love it. Other than that. And if you hate it, I'm sorry, but I think you will like it. Every once in a while a show or a movie or a game or something comes out, and I feel like it's something that I want you to play it or watch it. God of War is another one. We can do a subsection of our podcast where it's movies and TV backlogs. Well, I did think about it, too. I thought about we could do extra stuff, starting at 30 minutes, my ass. I thought we could do extra stuff like movie reviews if there's something kind of game-related. Like the Mario movie just came out, and I want to watch it, and I want to talk to you about it, too. Oh, yeah. I don't want to turn it into a homework project because I want to enjoy it, too. No, it is interesting, though. I know on your backlog you have the Metro, what is it, 2033 game, and I believe there's three or four games, and they were adapted from a series of books. I didn't know that. I didn't know that either, but there was another podcast that talked about them, and they went through and actually read, I think, the first book of the series and then went through and played some of the game and kind of compared the differences. So it's definitely a thought. See, I'm with movies and other forms of entertainment, and sometimes games, I think, mostly because I have a seven-year-old now. It's hard to break away to do some of these entertaining things, so I'm pretty basic on my entertainment consumption. You know, big Marvel guy that's just easy. I pick one game that I like playing every year, it's the Assassin's Creed. They're mostly coming out every year, so that's like the one thing I put pre-podcast, I put all my energy towards. So it's, you know, I definitely have to kind of treat it like the backlog for our games is definitely open it up to more things. Dude, I'll just, as a side note on that, it's kind of been crazy how I want to play games now. I didn't really, I feel like I was kind of starting to not enjoy games very much, and the reason was because I've only played games when they were multiplayer and competitive multiplayer-type games with my friends only. And so it's, I've really kind of got, I feel like I'm kind of getting back into playing games, and I'm more excited to play them now than, it's just, it's crazy to me because I was, you know, I feel like six months ago, I probably would have told someone, if they asked, I probably would have said like, yeah, I play games occasionally, but I don't really, I don't consider myself a gamer. But I feel like now, like, I'm excited. If I'm not tired before I go to bed, I'm very excited to play games at the end of the day. So it's weird. It's cool how that's working, because it's bringing enjoyment in something that I feel like has always been pretty important, but. Well, you were telling me earlier about another byproduct of this little project of ours is, as we're knocking games off of our backlogs, I believe you've added a few. Yeah, man, I know. I know. I'm supposed to get rid of the backlog, and it's growing faster. But there's been a lot of good sales lately. I think maybe with the Steam Deck being very popular, there's a lot of buzz around the new Asus thing coming out at some point. I've added a total of five games to my backlog since we even started the conception of this. So I don't know, man. But that's good. It's more content for you guys, more content for everybody, more content for me. I haven't gone out and bought any games, but I have added, I think, two. They were free games off of the Epic Game Launcher. Oh, I mean, we're not. I'm saying I purchased games. I don't know how many I've gotten. There's even some on GOG that I've gotten. There was a free Amazon thing. There was one that was a bigger title, but I don't remember what it was. That's how bad it gets. I wonder what it is. Now I want to know, because some of them were decent, man. All right, well, hey, do you want to talk about this week's game? If I don't figure out what game it was, I'm not going to be able to move forward. So just give me a second, and I'm sorry. And I'm telling you, there's no way. It was Wolfenstein, The New Order. It's free on Amazon right now. If you have a Prime account, which you do, you better. I do. I do. You slimy, sweaty consumers. Get in there. Get your free copy of Wolfenstein, The New Order from GOG.com, Amazon Prime member exclusive. How long is it available? Because this won't come out for, I don't know. Five days. Another month and a half. It takes five days before, and it's a 12- to 11-hour game. So if you missed it, yes, you're screwed up. You're not really the target audience, are you? You're not really keeping up with building your own backlog, which this is about. Oh, let's see. How does Amazon work for games? Wolfenstein? A lot of them, I think they're codes for other games or for other launchers. I know GOG.com, GOG.com, they do like a DRM-free version of games, I think, is what they were originally kind of based off of. I know that's how Wolfenstein, New Order came about on there. That's how you acquire it. Man, that's got my... I just added another game to my wish list. Here we go. I think Wolfenstein's on my list. You own it or something? No, I think it's on a game that I want to play. Oh, yeah. I grew up playing the Return to Castle Wolfenstein game. It was like one of the first FPS games that felt very big and expansive and modern to me. My sister had it on her computer, and I just remember it was very challenging, and it didn't feel like Goldeneye, where it kind of felt, to me, Goldeneye kind of felt linear. This game felt really open. There was that level where you had to sneak around, and it felt kind of that horror graphic kind of stuff that you would expect from a more mature game. It wasn't just secret agent guy. I was kind of excited to see that, and so I hold it very fondly in my heartstrings. Oh, man, there's a game made by the same company. It's coming out, made by the same company. We'll talk about it later, but it's called The Lost Wild, and it's like a survival horror adventure game with dinosaurs. So get ready. Get ready. Welcome back, everybody, to 321 Backlog. Today we're talking about Stray. That's right. I'm James T., and this is Alec L., and we've both played Stray this week on Steam. So we're going to be talking about that. I hope everybody is playing along, and we get to experience this a little bit together. There are going to be some spoilers, Yeah, we're going to try and do a little general discussion and maybe get into some spoiler stuff. If we get into that, we'll definitely put, like, a spoiler wall, just to give you guys a heads up. We're going to try and do a little general discussion, and maybe get into some spoiler stuff. If we get into that, we'll definitely put, like, a spoiler wall, just to give you guys a heads up. Okay, so this game came out July 19th of 2022. It was made by Blue 12 Studio and Annapurna Interactive, which sounds kind of cat-like. It was released on PlayStation 4 and 5, as every game was, I guess, at that time, with the shortages of PS5, and Microsoft Windows, which I guess would probably include Xbox and, obviously, PC. Yeah, I played it on Steam. You played it, actually, on a computer. Yes, well, on a computer with a controller. Yeah, and I played it using my Steam Deck exclusively, but I did dock it occasionally and play with a controller on a TV, but I guess it kind of functions the same way, basically. It did say that it was going to be released on PlayStation 4 and 5, but I don't know if that's true. It kind of functions the same way, basically. It did say that it was recommended to be played with a controller in the beginning of the game. There's like a little disclaimer on it. And you did that, I guess. I'm sure it would function just fine with mouse and keyboard. Now, I had already played this game before. This was actually on your backlog. I kind of picked it for you, knowing I had played it already. My initial playthrough, I did mouse and keyboard, and thinking back, I definitely recommend using the controller if possible. Do you remember, is it just the controller style? I'm sorry, the mouse is the camera and the WASD? Yeah, you're using the mouse to look around. I've never been good with these types of games with a mouse and keyboard. I've grown up using the controllers for the majority of my gaming career. It's just so much easier to use that, and my brain has been wired to know controllers versus keyboards for anything other than just typing. For me, it was definitely a better experience playing with a controller. That's cool. Yeah, I feel like I'm generally a little bit better with mouse and keyboard, but I'm kind of looking forward to getting more into using a controller again, because it's been a long time since I've played console-style games. This was kind of a good introduction to kind of getting back into that, I guess. It's not a super tough game for me. Why did you get this game? I want to know. You were the first one to play it. What made you think, I want to get the cat game? Actually, it was for my work. I travel a lot, and I get to meet a lot of people throughout the country. I was working with a group of customers that were themselves gamers, and we were kind of in some downtime. Maybe on our lunch break we were talking about just things that we had played and kind of doing the icebreakers of meeting new people in like a working environment. And somebody had said, hey, have you seen this Stray game coming out? And I hadn't heard of it. And he started going through just the general what it is, and it seemed so goofy that I had to kind of go and check it out. And then after finding it and seeing how you are controlling a cat and going through a lost-to-time city full of robots and some other things that we'll talk about, it just sounds so far-fetched. I was like, I have to check this out. And when you go and look at it on all the store pages and all over the Internet, the screen grabs and screenshots and game plays of this game just look so polished and detailed that you can't say no to it. And that was my first introduction. It was just from a pleasant conversation with some coworkers, and, yeah, that's where I started with it. And just to be clear, you don't consider yourself a cat person, right? No, not really. Cats are fine. I've always, you know. Well, that's, like, one thing. I've heard a lot of people that said that this game wasn't for them and they said that they're not cat people and this game was made just for cat people. I don't know if you've read that or heard that anywhere, but I feel like it's a big game either way. Yeah, I don't think if you're – see, I don't think the cat portion is the biggest part. Like, it's a big part of the game because it's what you're playing as, but the gameplay experience, the fact that it's a cat, I don't think detracts from anything. I still think it's still fun regardless. Yeah, I would agree with that. I feel like the environment and stuff was immersive enough being – it's kind of a post-apocalyptic looking environment. I feel like that alone, just experiencing the game, whether you're a cat person or not. Maybe you'll like cats better after you play this game. Yeah, I don't think playing this as a dog would have landed the same because you are – through different portions of the game, there is a bit of a stealthing element. There's a bit of a needing to be a bit more agile in spots, and I don't think it would have translated as well to a different animal. Oh, yeah. I don't think the platforming would have went well at all. No, not at all. Unless maybe an orangutan or a chimpanzee would probably do pretty well with a lot of it. It might be a bit too big, but, yeah, it would be dexterous enough. Maybe a small tamarind. I don't know. A small monkey. I don't even know what that is. So, yeah, this game was a 10 out of 10 on Steam. When I just typed it in on Google to try to get some of the general information I saw, it was a 10 out of 10 on Steam. I thought that was kind of funny. It had an overwhelmingly positive 100,000-plus reviews of people saying overwhelmingly positive. So I knew I was in for either a very divisive opinion or I was just going to like, like I have to like the game. And I agree with it. I'm very bad about going back and reviewing things, but I would have given it another 10 out of 10. It's such a good game. Great game. I enjoyed both playthroughs and a little bit of watching my son play through it because he played a little bit. Oh, yeah, my wife played it some too. Yeah. And he, you know, aside from getting stuck, he really enjoyed it. So it's definitely a game for everybody. And that's, yeah, that's one of the things I wanted to talk about. I feel like it was a very accessible game. The platforming wasn't crazy. You have the ability to turn off prompts. I don't know if you saw that in the menus and settings. You can turn the prompts off so it doesn't say press A or X to jump here. Oh, I did not see that. But that, I think, if I was to play it again, I may turn those off. Yeah, just so it makes it a little more, yeah, a little bit less obvious of where to go. I kept it on just because sometimes the camera was a little bit, it was like, you know, you weren't exactly seeing when you were looking up. I know I'm not going to get too, too heavy into the gameplay, but if you were trying to evade something, you're kind of in a hurry. It would be helpful to have the prompts for that. The dialogue. I think with those tool tips, they were simple enough. If you learn them real quick, because it was really just joysticks for movement and then A for jumping. And I think there was maybe an interact with, like, Y. Past that, once you learn those controls, they're pretty easy to commit to memory, for a controller at least. You could definitely turn those off and then play through without much interaction from any, like, UI. You're forgetting a pretty pivotal, very, I would consider it, important button you'd have to press to interact with the environment and stuff. It was, on my controller, it was O to meow. I think for my controller, it was Y. But, yes, that was very funny. Yeah, I know I don't want to, like, spoil a lot, but you can meow in this game, and I think that's a pretty big deal for a lot of people. No, definitely. When you start out the game doing very just general cat stuff, you know, moving around. Dude, that was like my, I mean, that was my favorite part of the game, man. You know, you're going around with your little cat family and snuggling up with them, and, you know, there's parts where you're just going around scratching on a post or drinking out of water and all that. But all throughout the game, not just this one portion before the story takes place, but all throughout the game there are kind of, like, breaking points where you can stop and let the cat be a cat, you know? Finding a nice comfy pillow or a lap of some of the NPCs to just sit, maybe have a coffee break, or you get a couple screenshots that are really showcasing the style and atmosphere of this game. Yeah, there was a couple times where there's, like, a musical element to the game a little bit, kind of a side quest, and when the music plays in it, a lot of the time you can just lay down. There's, like, a blanket there, so you can just lay down, or I guess it's a pillow or a blanket or something, but you can just lay down and listen to it and just enjoy it and just be a cat. Because it seems like something a cat would really do. If you're just busy and you're not paying attention to it, they would just lay down near you for when you're done and ready to scratch them. Yeah, I also had a couple times where if I needed to maybe step away from the computer but I couldn't, maybe I just forgot to pause or I wasn't in a spot where I needed to, like, make sure I was safe. If you just sit there for a moment and there's inactivity from your controller, the cat will start to, like, stretch and move around and do cat stuff, you know. So even in those times where you're not playing, the game is still keeping that idea of, like, your character is a cat, and it just does stuff to, you know, be a cat, and it was real fun. They used a real cat for this. They used a cat for the motion capture in the game, a real cat. Did you see that? Did you happen to know that? I didn't, but I'm not surprised. Yeah, this might be surprising, but also makes sense. It was a hairless cat that they used. Oh, interesting. But think about that, because with motion capture they probably put, I don't know for sure, but I would assume they put those little white beads things on them that they used in motion capture, and I feel like it would be a lot easier if the cat didn't have a lot of fur. Yes, it would. Because I'm sure, and I saw this in your notes, but if you try to put, like, a harness or a bodysuit on a cat, it would probably not enjoy that much. So I've done that. We have a cat, and she always wants to go outside, and that's why I put it in the notes. There's a little more to piggyback off that story, but our cat always wants to go outside, but it's not a good idea for this cat to go outside because she's not an outside cat. So my wife bought a harness for the cat, and we'll take her on a little walk in the backyard and stuff like that, and I don't know how long you have to walk a cat on a harness where they stop walking in a crouch position like they hate it, but every once in a while she'll just bolt out the door into the grass, and she doesn't walk like that, so it's not the grass, it's 100 percent the harness that makes them crouch walk all the time. There was that moment in the game where I stopped it, and I just put the controller down and turned the game off, and I said, I need to come back to this game with my wife playing it because she's a cat person, and she's not a big gamer, but I knew this would be a game that she would probably finish without me helping, so she's kind of been working on playing through that, which is fun, too, because I've already played through it, and now I can be there to kind of assist her in her journey if she needs it and encourage her. Lots of cat people got to stick together, man. That's awesome. Okay, and I wanted to say about the meowing thing, too. This was a thing I liked. Meowing is there. It doesn't seem like it really does anything initially. You're just meowing, and it's an option, and you can do it, but I like that eventually when you get a little bit of story progression, it helps show you where to go. Did you notice that at all? I didn't notice that. I noticed the level will tell you where to go and not necessarily needing interaction from the cat, so I didn't notice an exact correlation from me doing cat stuff and then the level giving me stuff. I just noticed the level would give you stuff regardless. Yes, every once in a while there would be like a little puzzle that kind of stops you, and if you push the meow button or key bind, you meow, and the lights will flicker in a direction showing you where to go or trying to give you a hint. This only happens initially to help you get a bearing on what the puzzles and obstacles will be. But, yes, so when I was just playing, I was just meowing all the time because it's cute or whatever, but then I started noticing. I put in our Discord, there's one screenshot where if you look, it lights up the letters H, E, L, and P with some arrows on a sign that happens when you meow. It's all kinds of stuff like that. There's another obstacle where you have to jump a certain way to get somewhere, and there will be lights that light up around that object. Yes. And it becomes a little more obvious later on why those things are happening. And also, adorably, there's an achievement you can get called a little chatty if you meow, I think, a hundred times, which sounds 100% like something an old cat lady would say, like, oh, you're a little chatty this morning. I like that. That's the kind of stuff that I think makes achievements cool. Someone like me, I don't care about achievements. I like stuff like that. Yes, I did not notice the meowing bit. I don't think I did it very often unless it was, you know, when you meet an NPC, I think they meow, but it's like you're not just doing it for the heck of it. You're trying to get their attention, rather. But as far as the level kind of, like, lighting stuff up, I definitely saw in multiple occasions where, especially when you're doing those, like, fast running scenes, knowing, like, which path to take, the level would kind of help you. Without being too heavy-handed, it would maybe light up, you know, have a white light on the side you're supposed to go in, but the other side would be dark, right? So not thinking about it quickly, you might go down the wrong path, have to start over, but if you're paying attention to what the level is kind of cueing you into, you can kind of navigate through those little lit areas, which is pretty cool. I feel like that comes down to me. That comes down to kind of good game design in general. Oh, yeah. I've said it before, and I'm going to say it every day of my life. I don't like it when video games explicitly tell you what you need to do or how to do it. I want you to learn. And if you can incorporate it seamlessly like that in a way that just shows you or nudges you without having, I always reference the stupid thing from Zelda, screaming in your ear, telling you what to do. Yeah, I think it's kind of part of that immersion, right? I mean, the more often it says, hey, go here, go here, it's breaking you away from that immersion, and this game is really good about keeping you in the game. Yeah, 100%. Okay. So, yeah, I think that's – do you have anything else you want to say about it before we kind of get into spoilers? Is there anything? What was this AI was originally used to make art? What was that about? That's later on in the game. That's one of the things that B-12 mentions to you. Oh, okay. Yeah. Or maybe it was one of the robots, but, yeah. On my notes, I think that's pretty much everything that is non-spoilery. See, other than that, one other thing I noticed about the gameplay is there are a lot of games like this that can bog you down with, like, optional quests and things that are just filler, right? I only ever found two instances of purely optional stuff. Everything else was there for a reason, and you actually had to interact with different NPCs and other, like, buildings or rooms or puzzles to progress the story. There wasn't a bunch of, like, hey, just do this just for the sake of that achievement or for the sake of showing gameplay. And this isn't too much of a spoiler, because they are optional, but in the first area you come to, there's finding sheet music, so one of the NPCs can perform music. And the other one I found was farther in one of the other levels. We shouldn't say levels, really. They're more like areas. One of the other areas, I think it was called Ant Village. It was one of the central, where when you leave your initial place, I think you have to go collect flowers for somebody. Right. Outside of those two, out of the entire game, nothing was optional, meaning that it wasn't filler. It was actually part of the gameplay, and it didn't feel like it was needless. And I really liked that about this game. It kept you in the game for the game, not just to do a bunch of collectibles and needless stuff just to buff that gameplay. So I really liked that. I guess there would be a third instance, but it was kind of part of the game, but kind of not. It was trying to help the secondary main character that you meet, trying to help them progress some story through memories. I don't think that gives too much away. But there were a handful that were core to the game, and then a few that weren't for just some filler. But you could continue on without needing all those, and you still got a good feeling of what story they were trying to portray. Yeah. I feel like that kind of makes the game feel a little bit less open world and a little more linear. But the fact that there are some side quest-type things you can do, and the fact the game is sort of open, you can choose when to do some of them. I like that in the game sometimes because it allows you to kind of get the focus stays on the game, where it's not like the game just opens up right from the start, and you can just... Some people love that. I like a little bit of linearity, a little bit of linearity in a game, because it kind of keeps the game focused on the story. I feel like you find that more in story-driven games, which I'm coming to see are kind of my preference, I think, is a game that stays focused. Yeah. As I get older, I definitely prefer story-driven games over your first-person shooters, like Call of Duty and Halo and stuff like that, for the multiplayer aspect. I definitely have gravitated more towards story-driven games. And as far as linear versus open world, I definitely think there is a time and a place for it. In this instance, linear, I think, worked better, but it gave you just enough of an open world aspect to where you didn't feel like you were totally confined. Dude, real life is open world enough, man. Like, I could get in my car and I could just drive until I hit water, you know? It's pretty open. The world I live in is more vast and expansive than Elden Ring and Skyrim put together. But, yeah, I like that aspect. I also feel like the game setting was kind of claustrophobic in a way, intentionally. And I feel like if it was super open world, you would lose that feeling of claustrophobia, which I think kind of plays a big role in the story of the game as well. So it's a really good style choice or design choice for the game, in my opinion. Yeah, I thought it was fantastic. That was a good point. I didn't really think too much of the side quests. The amount of them were good. That's true. So I think before we get into our spoilers section, and, again, for those listening, this is a little new for us. We're still trying to figure out our formatting and all that, so we're giving this a try. Yeah. So before we get into our spoilers, thanks again for listening. That was our just general discussion on Stray. If you want to find us on social media, you can find us at 321backlog on all your platforms. And if you want to send us an e-mail or connect with us that way, it is 321backlog at gmail.com. So here's our spoiler wall, and we'll continue on from that. But thank you. You've been warned, okay? No complaining. And before we progress through this spoiler wall, I just want to say the next two games are going to be Ori and the Blind Forest Definitive Edition, as well as Bioshock. We'll be playing the remastered version. So if you don't want to go through the spoilers, at least you know going forward which games are coming up next. That's all. All right. So now we're past our spoiler wall. We're not going to go through a full walkthrough, but more talking more candidly about our gameplay experience. We're going to still mention NPCs and specifics to some puzzles and all that, but not worrying about spoilers and stuff like that. That's right. That's what we're going to go into. So, yeah, is there a section in particular that you want to talk about first? I'd say probably the biggest section, the place that you're in the most, I think, is Dead City. Yeah, for sure. Once you get through and you fall into the city and you've gotten done with the little, I guess, prologue, tutorial, learning how to be a cat, you get into the real environment of the game. It's the dark place. It's got robots, and it was definitely the most fleshed-out city for me. It felt like you were there the longest. It felt like it had the most involvement, the most back and forth, and kind of, I guess, if you want to really think about it, it even had the most vertical accessibility rather than just being horizontal. So, it was my favorite city of the game, I guess. How did you feel about it? Yeah, I think I enjoyed Dead City the most. It was the place that you were in the most. There was more to interact with. There were definitely some other areas that I think had a similar number of NPCs, Midtown, for example, but it was more linear and to the point, I feel like, in Midtown. Dead City, you had, it was a lot of exploring, which makes sense, because you're still learning what the heck this whole world is. Yeah, it kind of set up the whole story to open up and actually tell a story. But I guess that's, you know, it's, you've learned how to play the game, generally speaking, and then you start kind of acquiring a little bit more of everything. More items, more pals, more NPCs, everything. And right before you meet the NPCs that make up the majority of the world, which are these humanoid bipedal robots. Love those guys. I think they all have, like, a TV screen for a head. Yeah, I love that they use that as a way to convey emotions, too. It's not just a face. They actually are, I guess, programmed to be able to have some kind of emotion, and it changes. You rub on them and their face lights up with a heart. Yeah. I love it. But right before you meet them, you meet another robot named B-12. It's this little drone that ends up being kind of your secondary character through the whole game. And you're kind of intermediary from cat-speak to robot-speak. Yeah. How did you like the introduction of B-12? I feel like it was a good way to kind of segue into actually exploring and interacting more closely with the environment rather than just doing the platforming. You got the box up there. You see the messages where he's asking, saying he needs a body and stuff like that. And then you're kind of just in this area. You know it's a major point because they tell you you're in, I think it was called the flat. Right. And you're just kind of figuring out everything in there, and then you do the cat thing and knock whatever you can off of a shelf. A lot of just being a cat to accidentally do X, Y, Z. And I really liked that aspect of this game. Yeah. Because there were certain points where I'm playing. And, again, I love this game. There were certain points where it's like, come on, the cat wouldn't have done that, or that's a little loose there. But it was still fun. Yeah. I mean, the cat might have done that. For sure. I don't know. We've got cats that do constantly just doing stupid cat stuff. They know a lot more than they let on. They're always scheming. Yeah. Oh. Yeah, I'm actually, yeah. I've got to put another note in based on that. There's one part later on where you trip the robots, dude. I love that. I think I tripped one by accident. Oh, it's so good, dude. It's so cat. Okay. So one of the first tasks you're given, your introduction into Dead City, you're mistaken by the locals as a Zerk. Yeah. Which are these little, how would you describe them? They're like these little bugs. I feel like they're like a parasite kind of. Yeah. Yeah. And I don't remember if the, if it did, I missed it because I played through this twice already. I might have missed what they were there for. I think they're kind of like a mutation of something. So, yeah, there's one of the, I think it's either through a memory or you talk to one of the other robots, like the bipedal ones. And they explain to you that they were originally created as a way to consume trash to try to cut down on the amount of trash in the city. And then they've evolved somewhat to just eating anything and not really requiring much else. They just, they consume is what they do, which I feel like kind of scary because I feel like that's something that we're going to end up doing one day. They already found some kind of bug or worm that eats styrofoam. Oh, wow. Yeah. So, that's, I mean, it's the futuristic game for a reason probably. So, another thing, they kind of scare, they get scared of you. You're an orange cat. The Zerks are also orange. So, it makes sense that you would kind of initially. You know, that does make sense. I didn't notice that at first. It's like they thought of everything. They really have. Yeah. So, once the fear has kind of subsided, you meet a lovely NPC by the name of Guardian who's kind of their guardian for things that are coming. He's like Gandalf, right? Yeah. He's got like a big quarterstaff that he wields, kind of a weapon, maybe a walking stick and a little. He has a very super, like a superhero stance. Right. Yeah, he does. He stands like, yeah, that's funny. It's true. He's the guardian. But through conversations with a couple of the NPCs, they're all kind of leading you, and the game does a really good job of this, through letting you navigate and search and explore whatever you have a task at hand that the game wants you to do. Instead of having like a tool tips or a UI that comes up and is like, hey, go here, go here. Through conversation, it says, oh, you know, I don't know the answer to your question or the thing you're showing me. Why don't you go talk to so-and-so? Yeah, exactly. And then you go to the next NPC, and they'll say, oh, I wonder if Momo knows about that. They live up on that building there, and they'll kind of like show you. So not everybody's going to give you the same cookie-cutter response, but they're all going to give you something similar to get to where you need to go. And the first person past guardian that you need to talk to is named Momo. Yeah. And also, this is the first area where you kind of open up a little bit more, and you're just not walking in the hallways to try to progress the game. It's also where you get that first side quest for the sheet music. Yes, yes. Did you end up finding them all? I did. And admittedly, I figured it was just a side quest that wasn't really going to be relevant. I didn't have any interest in it until I found one that was in a safe. It's right near the guy you give the music to. Yeah. I found the safe, but I couldn't find the code. Yeah. So the code, it's in a weird language. Eventually, you meet a robot that is very dorky. He helps you out in the game. He's an NPC. He's a part of the main story. Some NPC eventually, like I remember they referenced to me upon looking at the note and said that language is odd or something like that, and you have to find somebody real dorky that can translate it. I don't think those are the exact words. But then you go to him, and he says it's at the bar. He says, like, oh, it says this bar. So then that, of course, tells you go to the bar and do cat stuff and knock down a sign or something, and it shows you the code for the safe. And then it's just eight out of eight. It's the last music sheet that you could get. And when I got that one, I thought, like, oh, now I have to do this, because I feel like that was probably the most difficult one to figure out, which I guess maybe it was. So I was like, well, I've got to go and find the other sheet musics now because I've already, you know, and I like that it got me to commit to something that I probably would have just skipped over. It was an achievement. You didn't get, like, anything crazy. Yeah, I think I maybe got to six of them. Okay. Did you know who to give them to and everything as well? Yeah, yeah, because I had found a couple in my first playthrough, but I didn't find all of them before on that one either. And I think I found more this time around than I did the first time, because it had been probably six months in between plays. Yeah. Okay, so that's cool. Yeah, I liked that. And then the other quests that you do are part of the story. You've got to meet – you look for and find Doc Baltazar and Clementine's flats, and you kind of get clues from that, bring it back to Momo, and then there's some detergent you've got to find. It's kind of a lot to try to explain, but the energy drinks and the detergents. What I could speak to on that is it's kind of a lot of fetch quests, but in a – sorry, my phone just went crazy. It's kind of a lot of fetch quests, but in a good way. Right. And there's a couple instances where you need to – there's an exchange between the cat and B-12 with one of the NPCs, and there needs to be an exchange of some kind, but there's not really any currency, but they'll ask for certain things. Some of them ask for energy drinks that you can find. Yeah, it is really weird. There's a couple like – what are those called? Vending machines. There are a couple of vending machines throughout the level – the area, rather, that you can do cat stuff and accidentally cause one to come out, and there's one for one of the fetch quests. You specifically need this detergent to trade, and you have to find that. You have to do a couple other things to gain access to the room that it's in. When you break it down to a very simple, like, simple explanation, it's a lot of fetch quests, a lot of going back and forth, but they beef it up really well with NPC interactions that I think are really, really nice, and there's – each one that you talk to, each named NPC has its own personality that they did very, very well. I like – going back to the detergent thing, that NPC was great, the one that is running the thing. You knock the paint over, and it's just screaming as a robot. I don't know, man. I just loved all the – I loved the dialogue and, like, all the robot noises that they made. I feel like they just had a really good sound team for that specifically, and when that robot was pissed off, it had me laughing, man, just because he's just screaming up at the other robots. Yeah. And, you know, something to point out when you're talking about these different NPCs, it started to make me wonder, especially going through farther into this game, humans have since – what it's implying, humans have all since died off, and B-12 makes a couple of comments to this that, you know, you go in the bar, but there's, like, some tables that have food on it, or there's drinks, or there's a little bowl of peanuts or something, things that the robots cannot consume. There's a robot that's pretending to smoke at some point. Right, and farther in the game, you talk to some of these, and they're just – and they'll flat-out say in some way, shape, or form that they're just continuing what they were programmed to do. Yeah, yeah. So then when you come back to Dead City, where there's definitely the most kind of – the most life that you meet or that you experience, it's kind of hard to tell, is the guy in the laundromat just there because that's what he was programmed to do, or is he actually upset? Like, it kind of takes into that, like, which – Yeah, like, what's he doing with the laundry? I guess there are clothes, but – Which NPCs are stuck in that programming, and which have actually broken free from it. And it's really interesting kind of going through, not really knowing – not really knowing what the motivations are of the NPCs you interact with. And I thought it was a really interesting aspect. Yeah, that's – I guess I didn't really think about that, but I guess that's the beauty of a discussion, is kind of two people have different thoughts and interpretations on the game. So, yeah. I guess what were they – I don't know. I guess they were just kind of doing what they were supposed to. But then some of them obviously became pretty self-aware and wanted a little bit more for themselves, which is kind of what allows the story to progress for you. Yeah, so you're in the city, and you're going through, and you meet a bunch of NPCs, and eventually the main thing that you're going to need to do is you have to go through the sewers to get to another NPC that they're telling you is going to be able to help you that's already managed to leave. They know they left through the sewers, but there's a lot of these zerks in there, and they say you're going to need – there's a type of weapon that, I guess, Doc had invented. They were trying to get hold of Doc, who they lost communication with. And there's a couple of quests that you go through to make this happen, but through that you have to leave Dead City and leave the safety from these zerks, and the area ends up being called Dead End. And it starts with this little mini-game of running through a horde of zerks. And let me tell you, the first time I played that a couple months ago, that was one of the hardest sections for me to do, and I think it was because I was using mouse and keyboard, and everything was very sensitive. How did that go for you? I don't think – the only part with the zerks that really kind of gave me an issue was the part where – I can't – I think – I don't even remember if it was specifically in this area, but there was a part where there's an elevator, you have to hit the button and wait for it. Oh, man. That gave me a lot of trouble for a multitude of reasons. If you have to jump, it slows you down a little bit, so I learned to kind of circle around without jumping and take longer paths. And then there was another thing. The only real glitch I encountered in the game happened after that part. I rode the elevator up, and then I walked forward to go to the next area that was safe, and for some reason my cat just teleported back down, surrounded by the elevator all the way. Oh, no. So that was the only glitch I encountered in the whole game at all. But the mini-game of running, I don't recall it being very tough. This time around it wasn't as bad, but I think that was because I was using a controller, and it was easier for me to do. But my initial playthrough when I first found out about this game, that one I think I had to go through like ten times to finally get it. It was something about the playthrough that was just difficult. Yeah. But you get through that, and then you find Doc, and he, through another series of puzzles, because it's a big part of this game, he gives you a special light that you affix to B-12 that becomes like a zerk-popping light that is colored purple, which I think comes into play later. I don't know if he specifically stated it, but my guess is that it was a UV light. Did you remember it actually specifically saying that? I don't remember them saying that, but I guess it does make sense, because a lot of UV lights kind of have that hue to it. But they might have said it, and I just don't recall. I'm going off of the fact that I'm going to assume they didn't say it, and it was purple, and I say that because B-12 itself comes with a light, and this other one was like special, and it made it noticeably different. And I think that comes into play later on. With this, you now have a way to defeat these zerks and kind of move on, which was great. And from there, you revisit briefly, but then leave Dead City again, trying to get to Midtown so you can find another NPC by the name of Clementine. But going through those sewers, there was a lot of creepy stuff in the bowels of this city. Specifically, there was a point where the walls were like fleshy and pulsing. Do you remember that? Yeah, that was awful looking, man. It was very like body horror without the bodies. A lot of fleshy, pulsing, popping, wet skin. Breathing walls. Yeah, it was real gross. At some points, there were these large, using the cat as a scale, maybe like two-foot-in-diameter eyeballs that were all over the walls. And earlier, we were talking about it, and you said that you think the zerks had an eye on them. I'd have to see one up close, but maybe that's just how they evolve. If they eat enough, they get bigger like that, and maybe that's what they become. I don't know, but it was crazy to me because you're down there, and then out of nowhere, you don't realize you're definitely being watched, and then you know you're in for a bad time, right? Yes, that was a really stressful area, just because it was creepy to some degree, right? A lot of the sewers, it reminded me of the flood from Halo. Yeah, they kind of do in general, or the headcrab things from Half-Life, if you ever played that. I haven't, but I know what you're talking about. Put it on the backlog, dude. Put it on the backlog. I think it is on mine. I think it might be two-player. Sorry for that. But that's one thing, too. I feel like they needed something to kind of increase the fear factor or the feeling of endangerment, because at this point, you have a weapon, so you need something to make it feel a little more dangerous, and I think that did a good job because it becomes visually more dangerous. You have a weapon. You're armed. You know that you can kind of do something to survive these things instead of just running, but then they really increase it because you're going further and further into this nest of Zerks, and you know that you're just getting more surrounded. So that kind of leads into the next part where you end up kind of overdoing it with the light. Yeah, there's a point where you basically get to this one bit, and one of those eyes is going from, like, maybe a two-foot in diameter to, like, six to ten feet, and it's absolutely huge. Right. And from there, it kind of gives this, like, alert pulse or call and calls a bunch of Zerks into you, and you get surrounded, and B-12 does his best by himself. In this little cut scene, it was kind of emotional and intense. He overdid it and burned himself out using this new light, saving the cat, but then he kind of went unconscious. So the cat has to, like, grab him, and then you end the sewers with another minigame of, like, running through this, like, sewer area that was, you know, another one of those very tense kind of playthroughs or sections. Yeah, that's a very human thing to do that B-12 did there to save you. It was. It really humanized him. It really did, which then takes us to a big reveal. Oh, my God. Seamless, seamless. Right when you get out of that section of the sewers, you go into a little internal tower structure that is called Ant Village, and B-12, which has another set of inhabitants, and B-12 comes back to and kind of reveals through more memories and things after having a near-death experience that he thinks he was human at some point, and that kind of reveals more about the story and things that were going on. So this little drone that's been following around apparently was a human at one time, and his consciousness has been put back into this little drone, and he's kind of finding things out about himself as you play through. After that reveal from B-12, there's really not much else in Ant Village. Yeah, he goes silent for a while, too. He does. He's having, like, an existential crisis, and you kind of have to navigate a good bit of it by yourself, and so he won't translate for you, which is a big part of it. Every time you interact with one of the NPCs, he kind of helps to interact. Asks for a little more time, kind of. Yeah. But through that, Ant Village, very, very short part of the game, you meet another one of Momo's contacts, which was Balthazar? Zaltzabar? What was it? Zabalthazar, I guess. Yeah. They don't, yeah. It's a very hard pronunciation. You meet them, and they've, like, connected themselves to, like, some mainframe. They've, like, left their body. That whole interaction is just to say, hey, you need to continue on and get up to Midtown to meet your final NPC. I don't know if it was intentional for the art. I called it the art city in my notes, I guess. I don't know if it was the Ant Village. I guess it's kind of Ant Hill-like, too, how it just kind of goes down and then trails off a little. I don't know if it was intentional, but it was just a very short segment. I liked the city a lot, but there was, like, nothing there. I think it was in, like, a trash suit, or, like, where, like, waste and things pools together. That's what I think it was built into. Yeah, and they were, like, it was kind of funny because they were just making art, but they didn't seem to have any idea why they were doing it or why they needed to. Some of them were just, like, painting and kind of just discovering. But I guess that's kind of, at some point, that's what we did, too. Not me and you, but maybe our moms and dads. Yeah, one of the NPCs is sitting there just painting over and over again, and there's other NPCs nearby. And if you talk to them, they're like, man, I know he likes to paint, but I really wish he would stop painting and maybe do it somewhere else. They were, like, having interpersonal conflicts. It was very funny. Yeah, there was another part, too, where they said earlier, I think it was a memory you could unlock with B12, but they said that the AI originally, all AI was created to make art, which is kind of, I feel like that's the current thing we started going through before everything just exploded. But we were having these AI-generated art images very recently in our current timeline, and I just thought that was kind of interesting. I don't know if that was put in there. Like, I don't remember if that game came up with that idea first or if we had the AI art stuff going on before that. But I just thought, again, kind of with the bacteria eating trash, it kind of made me think it's definitely going to happen to us. If they make us move into, like, a dark city, I know it's over. You know, the release of this game and the release of, like, say, Mid-Journey or Chat GPT, which for those listening later, this is roughly about the time that that was all happening. The release of this game and those tools are fairly close together. So, you know, it's a little interesting just to be a coincidence. But... Did you do any of the side quests? Did you do the flower side quest there? I tried. I found one of the flowers, but then I couldn't find the other ones. Was it the one on the tree, like, just off of the... Yeah. That's the only one I saw, too, but I didn't really go out of my way. I just felt like the city didn't have a lot. I liked the city a lot, but I also felt like it didn't have a ton for me to really stick around for other than that. And since I had previously gotten the last sheet music quest and it was just an achievement, I figured it's probably not very important to the story. You know, I didn't find it. I looked for a very, very briefly. But as you and I are talking about it in the moment right now, I'm wondering, because I did go and do some cat stuff with a lot of the paint cans. Yeah. I am wondering if you can go get that flower a couple times, the purple one, and just paint it. And just paint it? What do you mean? Because there were a bunch of paint cans where the guy was, where the NPC was kind of expressing his art and just painting over and over again, and it had all those paint cans all around. I'm wondering. I don't know if this is the puzzle. I'm wondering if you could go get one of the flowers and just paint it, and the robot that wanted the flowers wouldn't know. Because all they were asking for were colored flowers, not types, not like a species of flower, but just a color. I think he was just trying to, because, you know, paints were originally made from plants and stuff like that. I think he was trying to acquire new colors is what it was. I think he was wanting to expand his arsenal of colors. So I would assume that there would be different colored flowers. That's what I thought when I initially played through. But thinking back, I think the NPC that was asking for them had a little, had like a flower bed and was like planting different plants and things. And how I interpreted it, thinking about it, was they were wanting to add more color to their garden through flowers. And I assumed that he was attempting to harvest more. You get the flower and you plant it to grow more. You can see that way you don't just use what you have. Or you would have an unlimited paint supply. Well, neither of us did it. So if anybody out there listening has done that optional quest, you should let us know what the heck it was. Yeah, I'm definitely, I can't look it up. I don't have. Nope, don't look it up. Yeah, I don't have the ability. Who do? We talk this much about flowers. Not me. So after you finally leave Ant Village, this towering little community, you make it to a subway station. And you're starting to see you're getting higher into this massive city and you're seeing more of what civilization once was. So you go into a subway station, everything's empty. But then that quickly leads you into the last major inhabited place, which is Midtown. Yeah. So that kind of opens up and you've got, it's very much a police state. You've got the sentries everywhere. You've got, it seems like there's, I mean, there's certain sections just blocked off by cops. Your introduction to it, you're watching somebody get arrested and saying that they're looking for this Clementine as well. So you're kind of in a race to find Clementine before the police, the sentries do. And whereas lower into, lower in the city, your main hazard was Zerks. And now it becomes these sentries, which are these, they're kind of like drones, kind of like B-12 is, but they're a little bigger. They've got like electric guns on them. So they're very dangerous and they're like helping the NPC police officers. There are parts of this where you actually have to stealth around and navigate around these sentries without getting hit. It's kind of funny because I just, I was trying to think of a way that, were the Zerks or the sentries more of a threat to you? The Zerks. Yeah. Okay. The sentry guns, they can chase you and they find you and they attract more. But like imagine trying to shoot a full sprint cat just with a gun in general, man. Yeah. So I found myself at some point when I encountered them, I would just keep, dude, I would just sprint. I didn't care if they saw me. I realized pretty quickly that like you can just outrun them and then kind of hide. But I guess that's kind of a cool way to, you've got more than one way to play. You can be spotted by the sentry, this is farther in my notes, but you can be spotted by the sentry and while still in view, because they have this little light on the ground showing that you've been spotted, while still in that light jumping up in a cardboard box and you're immediately invisible. Yeah. It stops chasing you entirely. I don't know if that was intentional, but it definitely helped me out farther into the area. That's one thing I've come to realize, just video games have taught me that cardboard boxes are the ultimate hiding thing. Whether it's Zelda's, you know, the barrels that you're hiding in or it's cardboard boxes, Metal Gear Solid and Stray, they're a very reliable way to just avoid a lot of problems in life. That actually, another thing too, we were talking about whether or not, like how interactive you could be with the meowing. That would attract the zerks and the sentries. If you meowed while you're in a cardboard box, they would all rush over to the, like they would all come from everywhere and just stay around the cardboard box kind of freaking out, not sure what was going on with it. I think you meowed in this game a lot more than I did. I told you, I set it up on the turbo controller, man, and I just let it go. I did meow a lot, but I noticed, like I said, I felt like really early on I kind of saw there was different ways to interact with it and I liked seeing all the different cat stuff you could do and I felt like that was a pretty big ticket. So once you kind of take in what this midtown area is going to be like, it is that police state there. You're on the search for an NPC named Clementine and you're seeing wanted posters and you're hearing conversations of the police looking for Clementine. So you're already aware that you're looking for a fugitive. Once you find them, you soon find out that they, one, they have a key to the subway. So right there you know you're going to have to help this person at some point to get out of this area, but the subway needs power. And to do that, you have to infiltrate this, I think it was NECO, but it's N-E-C-O Corporation, which has this atomic battery, which is going to be the power source of the subway so you can then leave. Right. So the whole midtown level is trying to, again, do those fetch quests to progress the story to then get to the place you need and then get the item and get it back to the NPC that you are trying to get it to. So it's a lot of back and forth. There's one really big thing I think you're kind of forgetting to mention from this area and it was the dancing robots. There was. And you joke, but again, the dancing robots, you have to interact with them as part of the fetch quest. So it was, though a joke, it was an actual part that you need to interact with per the story of the game, which was fantastic. Yeah. I just thought they had a lot of personality for what they were, compared to some of the other characters or the other robots in the game. It was just funny. They're just loitering. They're just generally being like scumbags kind of. And the first interaction you have with them, they're like, hey, get rid of these security cameras because we're tired of them. We just want to dance. Yeah, we just. It's so ridiculous. And then they're just sitting there. They give you a mixtape. Look, it's silly, man, but I love that because it was, it progressed the story, but it was also very goofy and it made these robots a little cuter. Yeah, talking about personality in the NPCs of Midtown, Midtown NPCs compared to Dead City. Dead City, I think, had probably 10, 15 interactable NPCs, some more important than others, for sure, but in some ways interactable and ones that you needed to talk to, for sure. Then you go over to Midtown, I think it was maybe half. There were more NPCs that were like walking around, but none that were as interactable with than Dead City. Would you find that true? Yeah, yeah, definitely. I think Dead City was kind of focused on just, they were kind of, they were at the bottom of everything. That's where all the trash went. They were just kind of waiting, almost like waiting it out kind of vibe. Yeah. It was almost like a kind of waiting it out kind of feeling. And then as you go up, the other ones are very focused on themselves and kind of exploring art and what it means to be self-aware, I feel like. And then you've got the ones in Midtown where they're kind of, I don't even know, man, they're just all over the place. Yeah, it was very much, to my earlier comment about not being able to tell if they were stuck in programming or if they were free thinking, I think it still was a little hard to tell in some points. I think Midtown had more instances of the free thinking because there were, you had that police state, so they were protectors of the area and peacekeepers and all that. And there was a sense of crime and a more human type thing. More rebellious in general. Yeah. Yeah. Well, a lot of the people, I want to call them people, a lot of the robots in Dead City were kind of just, it almost seemed like they were just sitting around waiting to expire or whatever happens to these wonderful robots. But the other ones had, you know, I feel like it was almost the progressive stages of enlightenment and then when you get to Midtown, it seemed like everybody was pretty rebellious for the most part. Yeah, that is a really good interpretation of that. I agree with that 100%. I mean, what are you going to, if you're getting trash dumped on you for your 300 years, what happens? I'm thinking back and I'm, you know, how many NPCs in Dead City were just sitting down, crisscross applesauce, blanket over their head and just kind of like huddling together, looking like they're huddling for warmth in some places. But they're not cold. They're not cold. Yeah. And then you progress into Ant Village a lot more. There are some that are sitting around, but a fraction of that. And then once you get to Midtown, everybody's on their feet, everybody's doing something, right? They're not just wasting away. I mean, they are. They are. They just maybe don't know it. But, yeah, that was kind of how I interpreted that. I didn't know. I guess I didn't realize it was going to get so deep, dude. Yeah. I think there were a lot more layers to this game than we maybe had noticed. No, there was three. We just went over it. There was Dead City, there was Midtown, and then Ant Village. That's it. There was three layers and then that's it. And it's just a simple story about a cat having a good time. And there's nothing. That's why I liked it. It was straightforward. No underlying messages. No, no lessons to learn. Nothing. So, to get this atomic battery, you need to get into this NECO corp, or NECO corp, which, again, is another puzzle to get through, but you have to use a specific NPC for access called Blazer, who, after you do all the things you need to do, ends up double crossing you. The guy with the gold chain. He's in a big jacket with a gold chain, man. He's in a bomber jacket with a gold chain, and he is creeping in an alleyway. Real scumbag. He's a real jerk. He's a real jerk. He ends up double crossing you, and then you go into cat jail, effectively. And this is the last, almost last area of the game where you have to, like, do major puzzles and all that. And you get double crossed. The sentries come in up in Midtown, and then smash cut, you're in a little cage just big enough for your cat to fit in, overhanging some water. Very weird. No B-12. That's still like water. Everybody knows that. I think it was just weird that, one, why didn't they kill the animal? When you think about, like, logic of the bad guys or whatever, why didn't they just eliminate the pest in their eyes, right? Well, I think, you know, it was just... I believe. So the way that they were handling any of these robots that were acting up was to basically reset their memory and take away their self-awareness. You can't really do that to a cat. They don't really know what it is, so I think their only solution was to put it in a cage, and that's kind of all they could do. Right. So... Yeah, I guess if they're programmed to remove the threat from society, it's not necessarily to eliminate it. Yeah. Well, there was, like, always a big thing with, like, you know, when robots are not supposed to... AI and stuff isn't supposed to harm people. That's, like, the number one thing they programmed first, right? Yeah, and that's got a name. I don't know. It's, like, the Turing test or something? I think that it's something like that, yeah. Yeah, and I believe, I think when you're leaving, when you first come into the subway, there's somebody that's got a little sleeping area. I took them as, like, a homeless person, a homeless robot, and they had a bunch of books near them, and when B-12 goes up and looks at it, it was a book of, like, something, something, like, basics of robotics, and then I think that Turing test was one of those books. Oh, that's cool, yeah. I didn't see that. That's nice. I was playing on a Steam Deck at that point, so I think my screen might have been a little small to be reading that. Maybe. So, yeah, you're in cat jail, and you've got to break out. Once you break out of your initial confinement, you find that Clementine has been put in a cell, and you have to get them out, and now it becomes a stealthing game where you don't have to only worry about the cat getting through, which is a lot easier to break out of places than a six-foot robot. You then have to take into account their stealth, not that you're controlling them, but then you have to solve puzzles to let them come through the area. So it ends up being a little more involved, but nonetheless it's still, you know, puzzles and stealthing. Yeah. I was pretty stealthy through most of that area right after you rescued B-12, but I think I probably could have just beelined it, grabbed B-12, and then ran out, because I feel like that's an option. There was an achievement for beating the game in under two hours. Really? So I feel like, yeah, you could probably just fly right through it, cat stuff, meow, meow. One thing I did notice in the jail, and I don't know if you noticed it, right after you get Clementine out of their cell, you start walking down one of the hallways, and I noticed that there was a skylight with, like, clouds and stuff, and that took me a second, and then I noticed that it started glitching. Oh. The prison, whatever this thing was in the game, had installed fake screens to show outside light. I did not notice that. And I thought that was very... Yeah, I've been to so many hospitals that, like, in the older parts of the area, they'll have those, like, those fading acrylic, like, painted on clouds and stuff that look god-awful. Any hospital administrators that do that for your sites, please stop that. It looks terrible. If you want to fake the outside, just put more windows in. Anyway, no side tangent. But, yeah, I thought that was interesting. It was a tiny detail that was completely unnecessary to code in this game, but it was such a good thing to have it in there. There was a ton of that kind of stuff in this game that I'm sure way more stuff that I didn't know. We've named a lot of things that I noticed and you didn't, and vice versa. There was so much. One thing I did want to talk about and get your interpretation, especially since we've been talking a little bit about, like, jailing in this world versus elimination and all that, we find out we go through with Clementine, past some large window or courtyard area, and we see that B-12 has been captured and, like, suspended in this big cage thing by, like, these four – because he's very tiny. He's only the size of, like, you know, a grapefruit. He's very tiny, right? But he's in this large, like, six-foot-by-six-foot-by-six-foot box with, like, force fields holding him in place. I thought that was very interesting. I don't know why the story did it because it wants you to get your little NPC back and all that, but do you think it was because he had, like, human intelligence potentially in his coding or something? I don't know. Any thoughts on that? Yeah, I'd say that's pretty possible. Maybe it was – maybe it wasn't the same process of wiping his memory that they did with the other robots. Maybe they were trying to find a use for him, you know, because he was able to translate. He did seem to have knowledge of things. But I also kind of feel like the Sentinels were very task-oriented and not really free-thinking at all. But, yeah, maybe – I don't know, maybe they just weren't sure how to deal with him either because I think what he was doing was definitely not part of the normal programming of that model of Sentry or whatever he was. Right, and if we haven't said it before, B-12s, once he started getting some of his memories back, I assume their memories back, his main directive was to get to the outside world. So for any action that B-12 and the cat take is to progress the chance of leaving the city entirely. Yeah, that was kind of the goal overall. Like, it made sense for you on a small level, but that was kind of the whole goal for all of them. Right. Okay, so yeah, you get Clementine and you get your B-12 back, and then you get out of that area, out of the jail, and back through the city. And it's kind of just this very Metal Gear Solid-esque escape thing where you're trying to get through the tunnel and run from the Sentries chasing you. And then Clementine kind of makes this very human sacrifice of just pulling them away and letting you go, which has kind of been a theme. Everybody's willing to sacrifice some part of everything for you. Because that's – and they explain to you the goal, again, is just to get somebody on the outside. Right. Even if it's one person needs to get outside. So they give you the keys to the subway, and you kind of have this – just everything is calm down there. Yeah. And it feels very – I don't want to say out of place, but it feels very solemn. Yeah. But real quick, to backtrack for a moment, just on the game, a little comment I wanted to make. When you're doing your escape, I thought the game did this really well, transitioning from game play to cut scene. A lot of games, it's a very jarring transition. Yeah. And there was a – you could tell that it was a cut scene, and just from – It was like a little hammer pan that kind of let you take over. But from, like, the graphical quality from the game play when it switched over to this escaping cut scene was probably one of the most seamless ones I think I've ever seen. The cut scene was pretty close. It was better, but it was still pretty close to the game play. I feel like we're going to see that more and more in games, because a lot of the time from the games we're used to are disk-based games, and you have that loading. But I think a lot of newer games, they're going to be installed on solid-state drives or something, and they're able to do that kind of stuff more now. And I feel like we're going to – I hope that that kind of becomes the norm, because graphics have also gotten so much better where you don't need to have these full CGI cut scenes in the same way. This game wasn't even that at all. It was – everything was kind of – it was in the same setting that you – Yeah, I thought they did a really good job with that. It was definitely something to call out. Yeah, I like that. A thumbs-up for them. So, yeah, you were saying we get down – after that, in Clementine's Sacrifice, we already had possession of this battery, but then they give you the keys to the subway, and then from here to the end of the game, it's a lot less chaotic, to the point where you can tell the game is winding down and a lot of the dangers have been overcome. Yeah, dissipated, yeah. And it's very sterile, the area you come up to. Yeah, right from where you get onto the subway car and get it to turn on and then continue on, once you arrive in the – what they deemed the control room, holy cow, such a big 180. Everything is clean. Everything is polished. You start seeing – there are robots moving around that are still also polished and clean. But one thing that I noticed immediately is the first one you get up to is sweeping or something, and you introduce yourself and meet this character, and they're no longer – we've met Momo and Guardian and Clementine. They have names. Now we're speaking to Helper 447, and you start to see this is probably where this AI started. They were just helping, right? Yeah, they're just keepers of the city kind of. It makes you wonder if some of the other robots had other program jobs that were – like the ones that you meet that actually have a personality, if their personality kind of stems from a job that they had. At least that makes me wonder. I don't know. That's the kind of stuff I think about. Yeah. One of them, Helper 211, he was painting. Oh, yeah. You could tell that where he was painting, there was this big square that was very discolored, and I think it was one of those cases of he's just painting in this code, and he's painting the same area for who knows how long. I think they said at some point 300 years since the humans were gone. Yeah. Yeah, man. He's just sitting there going up and down on this one little two-foot-by-two-foot section. Yeah, even the guy sweeping wasn't really sweeping the whole area. He was kind of just sweeping that spot. Yeah. I wonder what kind of energy these things use. Yeah. So, yeah, you get into this. It's kind of like a lobby, like a waiting room, right? There's a lot of seating, a couple doors to unnamed locations. It looks very like hospital or hotel lobby. It kind of reminded me of an airport, man. Yeah, that makes much more sense. That, I think, fits better. And at the back of the room, there's this wall-to-wall, ceiling-to-floor window overlooking the city, which is kind of dark. And you look up, and what you think are stars at first are actually, like, they're lights on this massive door or ceiling door that is covering the city from the outside world because they're in this very, you know, sequential pattern. Some other things to note in this area that I noticed, as you start to talk to more people, they start saying, oh, if you need help, you should talk to an engineer in the control room. So it's already that dialogue of lightly nudging you to go to this one place. Yeah. You also see that there's big red signs saying that the city is sealed off. And then in smaller print, if anyone tries to leave, there are heavy penalties, and I believe it either boldly says or implies heavily that you're going to go to prison if you try and leave. Yeah. Yeah. And it really becomes evident to see that, like, the people at some point were definitely trapped in there. Mm-hmm. And another thing, too, it kind of opens up the idea. They say it's Walled City 99. I see we both have put that in our notes. Yeah. Yeah, which to me implies that there were at least 98 more. Yeah. At least. How many? Where are we in the world? Is this a version of Earth? I don't know. I assume it is. Yeah, I think so. Yeah, for sure. It's definitely – I don't think the studio would do it. I think this – it might be perceived as trying to, like, you know, beat a dead horse or encroach on an already popular game, but they could easily, I think, visit some of these other cities in other games. I don't think they would, but I could definitely see this being a more expansive, potentially expansive world to explore. To be cool, I just want to say, man, I guess this could go at the end, but I hope they make some kind of follow-up or expansion, even if it has nothing to do with cats, just an expansion on the world in this game, because I feel like it's – there's a lot to it. What did the world end? Are there any humans remaining? What's the outside world look like? We saw through the cat early on, we see trees and foliage. You can hear birds chirping, right? Yeah. So there's life up there, but what's there? The optimistic part of me wants to say that, like, I think there's probably some people out there, because you know if they hoarded everybody into a city, if you've learned anything from movies or people in general, there's always going to be a couple people that don't do it. And those people wouldn't be stationed right around the cities, obviously. That's why you would never see them as the cat prior to ending up in Walled City 99. So I would think that there's got to be, unless they somehow – you never know. I don't know if it was with all the trash and stuff like that. I don't know what wiped out people outside of the cities that caused them to have to go into them, but yeah. So that's – you do cat stuff. You do cat stuff. Yeah. So you have to get in the control room, and it's locked. There's a couple puzzles to get through, and you get in, and basically B-12 is almost fully – I think by now has fully remembered his family and other parts of his life. He's like, hey, we need to get out. We need to continue on, so that's the thing. And he's like, hey, I'm going to start hacking stuff. You go do cat stuff. To the point where he's basically, I'm going to hack, you're going to destroy. He tells the cat to just go screw things up, right? Yeah. I like that. And it was great. So that's your whole objective is to find things you can interact with and rip them to shreds. And you do just that. And you do just that. And as you're doing that, B-12 is hacking stuff. And every time he hacks one successfully, you start seeing, like, his eyes will flicker and he'll – it looks like he's taking damage or something. Oh, yeah. He's even sparking. Yeah. And between going to different things, he starts sparking. Once you get the last one. He finishes it. He survives. Everything's fine. And then the game ends and it's a happy ending and nothing bad happens. Once he hacks the last one, his drone body is severely damaged. And one of the last things he has to do is kind of, like, upload himself one last time to unlock the city. But it's going to shred the – it's basically going to remove him from that little drone in a permanent way, which the cat has no idea. But as somebody playing it, you know what's coming. And it's like, all right, you've grown to kind of – to love this little robot and you know what's coming, right? And probably the saddest bit is once the drone finally falls to the ground, the cat doesn't know what's going on, right? And he starts pawing at it and it's not responsive. And just pulling at your heartstrings, the cat curls up next to him and takes a nap. That's not how – that's not the ending I had at all, man. It's not the ending. But it's not the ending. No, I mean the – I'm just kidding, man. That's – yeah. You're killing me. So, you know, the cat curls up next to him, takes a little nap. And then after that, you wake up and you get to try and navigate away and leave the city. And I think it was a really good job of trying to end this. Any comments on the sadness? Did it pull at your heartstrings as it did mine? It was sad. Yeah, it's – again, I feel like I saw it coming, you know, for sure, just because it seemed like – you could kind of tell he was going to die. It was definitely sad, but it was also cute. Yeah. I don't know. We're going to be wrapping this up in a few seconds here. There's some things I want to call out as the game's ending that I don't want people to gloss over, because you can tell that it's wrapping up, right? The climax has happened. It's definitely winding down. It's not the thing happens, cranks roll instantly. It gives you a moment to kind of play through the ending of actually leaving the city, in a bit of a subtle way, but I think it was really nice. The first thing, right when you get control after waking up from your little moment with B-12, go to the window and you can watch this massive door open and flood sunlight into the city. As that happens, it kind of goes to another cut scene where it kind of revisits most of the cast that you've met through your journey. I thought it did a really good job. You see the people in the slums and parts of Midtown that are seeing sunlight for the first time, which was just so, so nice to call back some of those characters you've since left. You also start to see Zerks that are deep in the slums and the bowels of the city that start topping and being destroyed from the sunlight, which makes me think that Doc's gun from early on in the game was emitting UV light, because that's what the sunlight's doing, and I thought it was a really good loop to close on that part of the game. So when I was looking at your notes, I saw the part about that with the Zerks popping and stuff. I don't remember that happening, but now that you're talking about it for this a little more, I don't remember any of that. Was that actually in the credit scene or what? It was. A Marvel movie style? No, I think I've mentioned it slightly out of order. Basically, when B-12 connects himself into the city's mainframe, once he does the thing to unlock, I think he falls to the ground and then the cut scene starts. So after the cut scene, then the cat interacts with B-12, realizing that it's now lifeless. That cut scene is already concluded. Dude, I'm not kidding, man. The robots looking up and seeing all that, I never got any of that. Oh, no. I'm going to have to watch that on YouTube or play through that part again. I mean, I don't know if it's skippable. Sometimes you can skip cut scenes. I don't know if that's the case. Maybe a button got hit or something. But how it came across in the screen, how the Steam version played it through, it had that little cut scene that I just thought really tied what experience you played through already and kind of calling back on that in these brief cut scenes, I thought was a really nice finishing touch. But then after that, you get a chance to watch the door open, and it was really nice. Yeah, I'm watching a YouTube video of it, and I swear, man, I don't recall any of this happening, which is really weird. Because I remember him laying down with B-12 and B-12 dying, but I didn't see the Zerks popping. I don't know what happened or why I wouldn't have seen it. But, guys, this is history right now. This is the first time I've seen it watching it on YouTube. Yeah, that's cool. I like that mechanic. So did it let you walk out the front door and walk into the sunlight? Did it at least let you do that? No. That's so weird to me. What happened for my game was you watch it opening, and you can kind of walk around in that room again. And that's all I got. I don't think there was, like, a part I missed or anything like that. Yeah, so after you get control after the cut scene and you wake up from your little cat nap, you can go back into the airport lobby. All the robots are doing the same thing. The only thing that's changed is all the signs that said, City Sealed, now say, City Open. Yeah, and that's what I did. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and you can go up to that big orange door. It opens up into a very similar scene to when you first start the game where you started in, like, a little sewer. But now you're leaving in, like, a stairwell. Okay, yeah, I saw that part. Very overgrown. As you walk towards the sunlight, the camera slowly pans out, and you get to walk your cat away in a very satisfying ending, I thought. And that's it. I don't know why I didn't get to see that part. I do know that – I don't think this would have anything to do with it, but I was playing on my Steam Deck, and I know that it was – my Steam Deck was almost dead. But I don't think I was – like, what kind of – what would it say about me to skip the last real scene of the game? I don't know. Yeah. So that's cool. Yeah, I just watched it, and it's a nice ending. It was a good ending. It's such a good ending, man. I can be pretty harsh with media – endings in certain forms of media. Usually I'm pretty lax about it, but this one I really, really liked. I like how it ended the game. Well, I did, too, now that I can say – I can definitely put – I liked it without even seeing that scene. I would have said it was still a really good ending, but it's crazy to me that I must – somehow didn't see that. I don't know. I don't know why. So did you have any other thoughts, anything we missed? I wanted to – I kind of wanted to – yeah, there's a few things. I just wanted to say I really liked the music. I feel like we didn't talk much about it, but all of the music in the game was fantastic. I really liked, especially, some of the weird tracks that you could get the guy to play. Some of them were interesting. Yeah, well, yeah. I also really liked the music in the club that you go into, which is also very weird that there's, like, drinks and stuff in the club. But the music that was in there was cool. I feel like the music team did a phenomenal job with the game. The people that made it obviously really liked cats, because every little thing you do that's cat-like was very intentional and very well done. There was even a paper bag you could get stuck on your head at least two places in the game. Yep. And it changes the direction of the controls until you – I think you have to run into a wall or something to get it off. But I thought that was cool. Oh, that's funny. I don't think I ever – I don't think I ever interacted with the bag. I saw them, and I'm like, nah, that's probably something I don't want to mess with. Yeah, that's a very – that's something a cat would do. It's just in there strictly just to appease the player. You know, it's not in there – that didn't serve a purpose. Right. But it was intentional, but it wasn't essential to the story. And then one thing I wanted to say, there was three save slots in the game when you go to load in and you make – and you create a save. There were three of them, and there was also three cities. So I think ideally maybe you could leave a save in each city to go back and kind of complete each one of those things if you had a little bit of foresight on that. Yeah, I – Or you did a second playthrough. In the energy drinks, there was the first guy – the first merchant, you'll call him, that wants stuff. There's, like, a covered-up – Yeah, well, I don't know what it was. I have no idea. Yeah, but you had to get, like, three of them. And I think I only ever found – I found two. I found two. So I wonder if there's, like, maybe a midtown or somewhere else maybe there's, like, a hidden one or something. I don't know. I don't know that you could go back. I don't know. I feel like you can't probably. But I got the impression that it was very final. But it would be cool to know if you could go back and maybe go hang out with, you know, Seamus again or Clementine. Yeah, I don't know how much replayability there are unless you're trying to do achievements and things, which I'm – I've got to be in the mood for achievements. Like, if I get one, it's like, oh, cool, that was interesting. But I don't seek them out typically. I like achievements, getting them unexpectedly and seeing it. But I'm not the kind of guy that loads up a game and looks through the achievements and says, like, yeah, I'm going to – I need to make sure I put aside time for that. Right. But that's also – you know, I'm a guy with 500-something games in a backlog, too. So I don't have time for that. I have – I've got to eat at some point. So I – what else? We got anything else? Yeah, so this was – this was the studio that made this. I guess this was – as far as I know, this was kind of their first big successful game. I can't wait to see what other games they come out with now because I think it's kind of a big break and they have a very good style. So I want to see whether they come up with another game that takes place in the same universe or anything. I feel pretty confident that they would do a good job. Maybe there's a couple games that they came out with prior to this. So they might slip into the backlog at some point. Oh, yeah. But there was one – there was one in particular. It's Dinosaurs. And it – I don't – that's obviously not what we're talking about here. But they have a couple other games and there's some that are going to come out that I really am interested in now just because I was very blown away by the studio. So I think that's kind of it to summarize the whole story and everything. I liked it. You hated it, right? Oh, it was the worst thing the world had ever played. No, I – Thanks, guys. Thanks. I loved this game. Like, truly. I have played it now through and through twice. And the first playthrough did not detract me from my second playthrough. Right. I played games multiple times very often. But sometimes you can get that feeling of, like, oh, it's this thing, I've got to do it again. Right. And I didn't get that. It was still enjoyable. And I think that's because even though there are big portions of this that are linear, you can do – to some extent, you can do things in the order you want to do them. Yeah. What I mean by that is, like, going back to Dead City for a minute, getting the detergent. You don't have to get the game's queue to obtain that item. You could – I happened to know I had to go there, so I triggered the event to let that room be accessible, and I got it ahead of time. Now, yes, I did that because of my first playthrough, but even if I didn't know about it and I just stumbled across it, it's still letting you pick up items and pick up things that you'll need later on in whatever order you want to pick them up in. And I thought that was a really nice – it was a good feature of the game that let me play it without having an issue playing it a previous time. Yeah, you can alter the pacing of it. Like I said, you can either sneak past the sentries, or if you're really trying to get through it, you can really just sprint past all of them, I think. And that will allow you to get through the game and explore the next areas a lot faster rather than creeping through them to get caught up to the third city if you wanted to explore it a little bit more and see what it had to offer. So it's good. I like that there's options to fast-pace through it without putting fast travel in. It's not a very long game, but it can be shorter if you need it to. I definitely liked that we were able to get this off of the backlog and make room for more. It was real good. I thoroughly enjoyed it. If you haven't played it, go play it. It's fantastic. It is. Yeah, it's a good game. Steam, overwhelmingly positive, 100,000 plus reviews. It's got a cat in it, if you like cats. If you don't even like – I don't know why you'd be listening to this podcast, but if you don't even really like video games, but you like cats, or you know somebody that does, like, comment, subscribe. If you know someone that likes cats, I think they would enjoy this game, just interacting with it. I bet someone's grandma would love this game, probably, maybe. I don't know. It really is. From the gameplay itself to the visuals and the atmosphere that you get from it, the level design and all that, it's 10 out of 10 for me. Okay. Well, I would give it a – I don't know. I don't know if I can really rate it. I would say overwhelmingly positive. It was a good game. I don't know if I can place a number on it, because I don't know what 10 out of 10 goes, but I feel like they did a – it's a good game. It gets a thumbs up from me. Big old thumbs up. I think that's going to wrap it up, but just like our Aladdin episode, we need to announce what we're playing for the next two games. The next two games are going to be Ori and the Blind Forest. I'm going to play the Definitive Edition. That is admittedly a game that I've added to my backlog since we started the podcast, which, you know, very unproductive of me. But it looks phenomenal. I think it's going to be a very good game. And then we're also going to do Bioshock, which somehow neither of us have played. I know it's a staple game, and it's a big game, so I'm really looking forward to that. I think – is it safe to say we're going to play Ori first? That'll be the next episode? Yeah, we're going to play Ori first. We've been doing a good mix of platforming games and non-platforming games, so we're going to get that split in the episodes. Ori and the Blind Forest, I was going to play this a couple years ago when it came out, and for, you know, one reason or another, it just kind of slipped away. And Bioshock, I actually played for about however long it takes you to hit start, and then you step out of the capsule when there's a blood-curdling scream. And that was enough for you? And that was enough, because I'm not a big horror fan, so when that happened, I'm like, hmm, I'm good. And I put it down. There's no excuses now, okay? No excuses. I'm going to have to do it. I'm older. I'm wiser. And it's on paper. You have no choice. If you change this, you're not editing that at all. Nope, can't do it. Okay, so yeah, I think that's it. Thanks, guys. Thank you for listening, guys. Thanks so much for listening. That wraps up our discussion on Stray. If you enjoyed this episode, please let us know with a thumbs-up, a comment, or sharing with your friends and family. If you're able to do so, play along with us. We'll post upcoming games to our socials, and what games are up next at the end of each episode. This has been 321 Backlog by Alla Bell and James Sheehy, our show music of Lift-Off by Amy Waters. You can find this song and more of their work at amywaters.bandcamp.com. You can connect with us on any of our social media pages and by sending us an email at 321backlog at gmail.com. Until next time. Bye.
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