Our Inescapable Distance From Other Minds | STRAY Analysis & Review 

Really thoughtful discussion of Stray. One thing I'll add is that at the end of the game, the cat looks directly at the camera and slowly blinks. With cats, a slow blink is usually a sign of trust and love. I interpreted that as a thank you to the player for guiding them and an acknowledgment that the game was always a conversation between the cat, B-12 and the player.

I’ve never seen such a philosophical take on a game about funny cats and robots

B1/2 is very lonely. So when he talks to the cat, he is really talking to himself, like when pet owners talk to their pet. They don't know what we're saying, we're just talking for our own benefit. Likewise the robot is talking to the cat to help with his own loneliness and to process the world in his new body. A very interesting part of the robot society is the families they make. Seamus and Doc are son and father, there is a child robot among "grown up" robots in the Antvillage, and many robots in the Antvillage including the kid call Clementine their aunt.

“…you’re completely right, cuz it is about bein a cat and we’re gonna talk about what that means to be a cat” kills me for some reason

What we expected: a cat simulator What we got: contemplating about the meaning of existence And great video, really makes me questioning a lot of things about life

My view is the robots were servants, and now are the bodies of their former masters. An attempted form of transhumanism akin to B12's attempt to download themself to a new body, the robots forgot they were people once. You can see this in the burger shop, B12 recalls their favourite burger shop was run by someone whos' name began with an M. The robot in that shop, named Mattbee, starts with an M. That's the burger shop guy, forever doing his old job, serving oil and old computer chips, much like he did in life.

The message I took away: If we as players can step into the shoes of cats, we can step into the shoes of other people and try and better understand each other.

What I like is it feels like both. I feel like I'm the cat, but also like I'm a ghost or spirit helping the cat. One could even argue you are seeing the cat from B12's perspective, if you're willing to accept the cat is more intelligent than a normal housecat. I just go with whatever feels the most fun at the moment. Also, noticing how silly society's norms/pretendings are is something many neurodivergent people never had a choice but to do. That's one reason I love the game, I feel more like myself from this cat's perspective. It felt familiar, not new. Freeing, not like a big mental shift. I even tried/wanted to climb everything as a kid and to this day dream about moving around like that, rather than being stuck in lines and walkways. Meanwhile, people's faces don't seem that different from a robot's to me, alien and hard to read without context clues. Only with actual robots, that's expected. I wonder how many of us not so typical brains love the game for these exact reasons.

This quality of video is not worth a mere 600 subscribers… amazing analysis

The cat character your playing as falls into the dark abyss then spawns on a wheel barrow in a medieval setting an- wait a minute this is just skyrim

I feel more sorry for the robots after watching your video. I hope after the opening of the city, they get to go out and evolve into their own seperate beings.

Thank you for making this analysis video! You put into words the thoughts I had when I was playing with Stray. I was wondering what message the developers want its player to get from the obvious dissonance between symbols that humans intuitively understood vs. how a cat would interpret said symbols

Truly a game about cats and robots 👍🏻

Thanks macro for recommending such an amazing channel

Annapurna Interactive rarely misses. The top two games I played this year were both published by them. These games just generate good video essays

How do you not have more subs??? This video was amazing!

Truly amazing, also liked the poetry. Even thought you were going to mention Thomas Nagel. Would love your take on Rainworld , where the interface of english language to the player is mostly absent. Thanks for the analysis again, you deserve more views and subscribers.

Great vocabulary

Great video, amazing narrative and editing. But Stray is honestly one of my favourite games of all time.

I think this video is a great example of the value of art. In this case, I mean that the game itself serves primarily as a canvas, onto which the viewer paints their thoughts through the process of spontaneous reaction. I honestly don't think the developers thought half as hard or as deeply as you did about the topics you discuss here. I strongly suspect that, in fact, they chose robots because robots are easier and cheaper to animate than humans :) Yet here we are, with the benefit of your thoughts having expanded the art to something broader and deeper than its original conception. I'm not even sure that 'great art' is much more than a statistical outlier; a randomly assembled shape, akin to a biological protein in its random genesis and similarly honed by the gauntlet of selection, that simply happens to bounce off the myriad minds in the world in interestingly generative ways. Something fundamentally only discoverable by rolling the dice inconceivably countless times... and accepting that almost every attempt made along the way will constitute a miserable failure.

I can already tell this channel is going to be a banger

Amazing high quality video

I see where you see how animals like a cat don't see language the same way as a human, not quite, only after I was 20, did I realise that other people hear a voice when they read, or think, only then, did I start thinking in language, what language does a baby think in? I know, the same language I thought in. It wasn't linguistic, it wasn't visual either, symbolic of sorts, (but I'm not sure how people with aphantasia would see the world how I did before I learnt to speak) they learn how humans think based on their interactions with me (I have had many cats, trust me, they learn) the biggest difference between man and animal, is their thinking is rigid in a different way than mankind's is

Do you boys have a background in the Humanities? Hans Moeller is quite the name drop.

Macro sent me. Nice content!

What are your thoughts on the ending of the game, with the robots that are completely ordinary with no human-like behavior? A lot of people see it as evidence that the rest of the robots are actually humans who did what B-12 did (or tried to do), they uploaded their minds into the robot bodies to escape the plague and then forgot they were human. There's also some other pods like the one seen at the beginning of the game and the one in in the big tree village that B-12 comments on, and you actually knock down the head of the robot B-12 had tried to upload into at the start of the game. I think the ending re-contextualizes a lot of the game, since until that point B-12 leads you to believe that the robots developed sentience on their own after humans died out. So you go through the game thinking of things in one way, and then at the end you end up seeing it in a totally different way. (If you already commented on this in the video I apologize, my ADHD makes me zone out a lot and I already tried to listen through the video twice.) As for the cat, it's implied that a significantly huge amount of time passed between humans dying out and the outside world being able to support life again, so it's possible cats could have evolved to be more intelligent in that time. That's my headcanon.

Macro sent me here

I always kind of thought that the robots did human things bc they were programmed by humans and therefore have a way of understanding the world that comes from humans' understanding of the world and that being kind of being unintentional or intentionally programmed into them. Like how we see ai often unintentionally perpetrating prejudices we see in society today. Their ways of thinking are based on how humans thought. There's something I find kind of comforting about it in a way. People often worry about what legacies they leave behind, how they will be remembered after they die. Even though the humans may have died a long time ago, there's parts of them that's still remembered. It's not gone just bc the humans are. I find it sweet. Even if there's a lot of the unsavory parts of society and culture in it. It's like B12 said about seeing a future in the robots

I've watched this video at least 3 times so far and I love it. I enjoy your thoughts and opinion on this game. I beat it on PS4 and planning on beating it for Switch and making my own video eventually.

Nice vid. love this channel. You should have more subs

macro sent me, great quality vid kept me. subbed

HOW DO YOU HAVE SO LITTLE SUBS THIS VIDEO WAS AMAZING!

Here from macro

i really loved this game and this video was also great, thanks for sharing! [game spoilers below] a theory i had when playing that this video reminded me of: when i played it, because of how you find your little flying robot friend next to that pod thingie and a "dead" robot, and later with the game plot twist, i had the feeling that all the robots in the game were originally human. they don't even remember that anymore. but at some point, like the little robot friend, they transferred themselves to these robots to survive the meat-eating monsters, and tried to carry on with life. that's why the robots down there are so different from the ones on the surface, with zero personalities, just sort of continuing with their tasks. they were human once, and they're still trying to be, in a way. somehow that makes the whole thing sadder to me? haha

Haven't watched the video yet but I know it will be great. This game was awesome 👌. It was a very insightful and thought provoking experience. I really enjoyed it on PS4 with HDR. I'm probably gonna buy it again on pc to be able to record footage and make a video. I also wanna see it at 144hz and max settings.

one very dark theory is that it is in an ordinary city with ordinary humans it just seems alien because he/she is a cat even tough cats see humans a giant cat not as robot's

Macro sent me here, no regrets

Tell ur cousin I love him

The cat simulator everyone wanted and got

Macro sent me aswell

This game is awesome and i really love it but i just wish you could choose what type of cat you are

Y A N O O B

Hello macro cousin

Ahh yes the macro

Macro beckons you

U will always be known as Macro”s cousin

Wtf i just watched 😳♥️ Subscribed man🫂