Stray makes an ordinary cat the hero of a neon robot city

Two former Ubisoft artists began making art of a cat wandering a neon, rain-soaked city; the GIFs went viral and publisher Annapurna signed the project within months. Their challenge was to build a full adventure around a protagonist who cannot fight, talk or read — an ordinary cat.

Cast the player as an ordinary stray cat: no fighting or talking, just cat movement and curiosity, so a whole dystopian city is explored at cat height with cat logic.

The studio studied real cats to make movement feel effortless — climbing, squeezing through gaps and landing safely — instead of Mario-style platforming with missable jumps. The city's robot inhabitants speak an invented alphabet, translated for the player by B-12, a small drone companion, so environmental storytelling carries the plot.

Stray won Best Independent Game and Best Debut Indie at The Game Awards 2022 and was nominated for Game of the Year, and critics praised the cat's-eye perspective — The Guardian gave it 10/10 and GameSpot 9/10.

Stray began in 2015 as 'HK_Project', a single piece of art and a GIF made by two former Ubisoft artists, Koola and Viv, who wanted to try something they had never done: a small black cat wandering the neon, rain-soaked streets of a lost city. The image lit up the internet, and within about six months publisher Annapurna Interactive signed the project.

The city in the image was inspired by Kowloon Walled City, and that dense, vertical world is what made a cat the perfect protagonist: players should feel lost in the same way the artists did. The team built Stray around what a real cat can do — fluid climbing, squeezing, silent movement and safe landings — deliberately avoiding platforming built on missed jumps, because cats never miss.

Because the hero cannot speak or read, the world had to tell the story. The robots of the city use an invented alphabet, and a tiny flying companion named B-12 translates it for the player, turning environmental storytelling into the game's language. At peak production the whole game was made by about 27 people plus two full-time cats in Montpellier.

Released in 2022, Stray became one of the year's most celebrated games: it won Best Independent Game and Best Debut Indie at The Game Awards 2022 and was nominated for Game of the Year, while critics from The Guardian to GameSpot praised the way the cat's perspective made an ordinary animal feel extraordinary.

Cat logic is instantly legible — players know what a cat would do, so curiosity replaces tutorials.

Removing combat and dialogue forced the environment, the robots and B-12 to do all the storytelling.

The viral GIF proved the fantasy before the game existed, and brought a publisher to two artists within months.

The dense Kowloon-style city gave cat climbing a natural reason and gave the game a look nobody had seen before.

A strange protagonist is a licence to rethink every mechanic: once the hero cannot fight or talk, movement, curiosity and companionship must carry the whole game.

Stray turned a single art experiment into one of 2022's biggest indie successes. It swept the indie honours at The Game Awards 2022 — Best Independent Game and Best Debut Indie — alongside a Game of the Year nomination, and its cat protagonist became an internet favourite as players shared clips of meowing, scratching and knocking things over. For BlueTwelve, the studio the two artists founded in 2016, it established a first game that proved a small team could build a full adventure around one strange, well-executed idea.