The cat is out of the bag \u2014 and probably all over your Twitter feed. <\/p>\n
\u201cStray,\u201d a new videogame for Sony’s SONY, The $29.99 third-person platform adventure and puzzle game \u2014 from French development studio BlueTwelve, and published by Annapurna Interactive \u2014 has drawn plenty of hype since it was first teased during the 2020 PS5 reveal event. (A newer trailer released on June 2 has already been viewed more than 1.7 million times on PlayStation’s YouTube account.) <\/p>\n And now the long awaited \u201ccat game\u201d is here \u2014 and players and their feline friends are already obsessed. <\/p>\n Some mild spoilers follow: The gist of the game is that you play a lost, stray cat navigating a subterranean city populated by robots. The goal is to get back to the surface world, where your feline friends live. Your stray soon teams up with a sentient drone named B12 (who can talk to the humanoid robots for your cat character), and the two of you explore the city and solve puzzles to find your way home, discovering what happened to all of the humans along the way \u2014 while also avoiding hungry monsters who want to eat this cute kitty up almost as much as the players do. <\/p>\n \u201cStray\u201d was trending on Twitter on both Monday and Tuesday, around the game’s launch, drawing more than 363,000 tweets by late Tuesday afternoon. And perhaps the most adorable early trend featured gamers posting videos of their own cats being transfixed by the nameless, pawed protagonist.<\/p>\n The BlueTwelve Studio game developers weren’t immediately available for comment. But they revealed in a PlayStation blog post that they took care to make the stray at the center of the game look and feel as much like real cats as possible. (Well, except for showing cat buttholes, apparently.) And the finished product seems to be resonating with real-life felines and their humans, alike. <\/p>\n Some dogs were getting into it, too. <\/p>\n The PlayStation blog post also introduced the three cats that inspired the game’s leading feline. They include an orange tabby named Murtaugh, a former stray, himself, who was found under a car in Montpellier, France. He now lives with BlueTwelve Studio’s co-owners. And a hairless Sphynx named Oscar was the muse to the main cat animator \u2014 who reportedly animated the cats by hand, not with a motion-capture suit \u2014 to nail down the subtleties of a feline’s movements when it runs, jumps, scratches, \u201cboops the snoot\u201d and climbs. Both cats were regular visitors inside the development team’s studio. \u201cHaving real cats under our noses during the whole development was of course extremely helpful in many ways,\u201d the blog post said.<\/p>\n
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\n PlayStation and Microsoft MSFT,
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\n Windows, lets players explore a subterranean, cyberpunk city as ginger tabby that’s trying to claw its way back to its family. <\/p>\n