The Haunted Hoard: Stray Cat Crossing (PC)
The Steam store page for Stray Cat Crossing not only helpfully lists its time of completion as being around 2 hours, but it also uses that for a comparison. Stray Cat Crossing “might as well be a feature film” in the creator’s own words, and while it’s important to remember the benefits a video game has over film in order to get the most out of the medium, it’s not a bad way of thinking about your game either. A film needs to be cohesive and focused, and some horror games can spread their concept out and sacrifice a more personal tale for it. Something like Death Mark can still come out enjoyable because of the strength of the almost disconnected parts, but a game like Red Bow ends up feeling like a bunch of small stories weakly strung together. Stray Cat Crossing keeps its focus on its personal narrative throughout, and while it has its own deviations, it certainly benefits from its commitment to a clear central narrative.
A red-haired young woman encounters a little girl named Cat out on the street on a cold night and decides to help the child find her way home. The woman, the game’s playable protagonist, hands her scarf to Cat to keep her warm, but when she drops Cat off at her home, the lady realizes she hadn’t asked for her scarf back. Heading into the house, the heroine soon finds it much stranger than anticipated, with horrific and deadly sights that begin to reveal more about Cat and her family’s unfortunate past. At multiple points the leading lady does have the chance to step out and just leave, and if you only read things on a surface level, the fact she stays at the house despite the danger can seem rather silly. The only justification she gives is that she hasn’t gotten the scarf back from Cat yet, but there’s a deeper personal reason she can’t articulate that the player is left to find out, the 2 hour horror story keeping its focus tight so you can unravel the truth at a decent pace.
Most of Stray Cat Crossing makes use of metaphors manifesting as living things and dangerous situations to convey its story, and while it doesn’t outright confirm the meaning of any of them, the end of the game certainly does its best to put them in a context where you don’t have to try hard to decipher them. The horrors of Stray Cat Crossing come from how these obfuscated details take shape, the game putting one of its most striking images front and center as the first things you encounter. A pair of beings with porcelain baby doll heads on otherwise expensively dressed bodies greet you when you enter Cat’s house, but the two never actually have the porcelain face at the same time. Whenever one speaks it assumes the baby’s face while the other takes on a much fleshier and disgruntled face like an infant about to cry. While these strange characters might seem like they’re only meant to be interesting encounters in the context of the situation you meet them, they are not only relevant to the overall plot when you decipher their meaning, but even the puzzles in the nearby area have some connection to them and the story as well.
There are certainly parts of the experience that aren’t directly linked to the true story of Cat’s past and some that have rather weak or tenuous ones. For example, while seasons have a mild relevance to the story you’re uncovering, the fact they manifest as four hungry wolves who are all connected at the hip seems like it is just a way to have the topic appear as something memorable. However, the situation the season wolves find themselves does still have some meaning that can be interpreted properly once you get more context for Cat’s living situation. Most of the meaning only really starts to come together in the more bare-faced allusions to reality that start appearing in the theater portion of the game near the end as actual details are presented without much obfuscation, but connecting the dots with earlier events is still an interesting process and one that makes the horror experienced on the way to this more expository portion feel justified.
Most of the actual play in Stray Cat Crossing involves you walking around whatever strange place you find yourself in, be it an exterior garden with a hedge maze and a pond that can only be crossed properly depending on the time or a theater where you’ll reenact parts of Cat’s life on stage. Puzzles pop up to impede your path, and while some of them require a bit of thought, a lot are just about grabbing the right item or triggering a character to behave a certain way. There’s a part where you need to sort out an exact amount of water by slowly swapping water between urns and other puzzles that require some thought, but others are things like collecting a few potions and just using them when prompted or giving a nutcracker the right object even though you have the option to put a few wrong ones in his mouth too that he’ll just refuse to crack.
The straightforward puzzles aren’t offensive though and a few that do work keep your involvement interesting enough, but then there are plenty of moments where Stray Cat Crossing tries an idea and it falls flat. While the chase scene near the beginning is fairly easy to die in, there’s a save point nearby so retrying it isn’t too difficult despite it being a touch annoying since you can’t afford to take the wrong path for even a second. However, the hedge maze that keeps shifting about is annoying to traverse even if you understand the gimmick at play. It still involves a lot of traveling around in aimless directions to speak with little grubs who don’t say much worth knowing, but this has nothing on the theater segment near the end. The theater section is a time loop that keeps repeating again and again, the player needing to try various different dialogue choices and item uses to get an event that can progress the story. You can get more details about the story by pursuing the different routes at this part but they’re not all that meaty, and when those become dead ends that end what you can do in that particular loop, they certainly don’t feel like they’re worth it. Little direction is given for the right path so you keep trying different items or choices until you find something new, and you might not even be prepared properly for that. It’s a good thing the game is as short as it is or else this section could have really dragged on far too long, but it certainly stretches its portion thin, especially considering it’s the longest of only three major parts the plot has.
This leaves Stray Cat Crossing in a bit of a rough spot. Visually it has many striking images that usually have at least some purpose to them, even if the exact nature does sometimes favor looking interesting over connecting to the overall narrative. The music is suitably atmospheric at times, beautiful at others, and able to convey the mood of the moment quite well, and the pixel art featured is nicely detailed and plays its role properly for the most part. The artistry is definitely the game’s highlight and it’s not stylish just for the sake of it, but the narrative payoffs, while existing, don’t feel like they tie things together well enough to completely ignore the tedium in parts of the play. Wandering around aimlessly or poking at the puzzles in the theater aren’t going to pay off with some heart-wrenching conclusion or spectacular finale, but your efforts do at least allow for a cohesive narrative to play out and you can walk away with some parts leaving a positive impression on you. It may lose some players with its annoyances, but others will push through because of the quality elsewhere, so it’s going to find itself traveling a subjective middle road based on where a particular player will lean.
THE VERDICT: Stray Cat Crossing’s balancing act is a hard one to judge. The pixel art is used to great effect for detailed environments and striking character designs, the music matches the scenes it accompanies well, and most images at least have some thread that connects to the overall narrative. However, experiencing the story involves plenty of unimaginative and straightforward puzzles when its not indulging in tedious mazes or a confusing time loop near the conclusion. It does feel like an individual player’s opinion will come down to what they value most of the two sides of the experience, but since they all exist in service of a fairly cohesive narrative, the strength of the story is likely a deciding factor as well. While the plot connects to everything fairly well, it’s also rather straightforward when things are laid out on the table for consideration, the payoff needing a bit more oomph to truly assist the aesthetic touches in completely clearing away the lingering taste of the shaky gameplay.
And so, I give Stray Cat Crossing for PC…
An OKAY rating. Stray Cat Crossing does contain plenty of well-conceived symbolism and artistry in regards to its presentation, and considering its length, it’s not too hard to recommend it solely on that. However, it’s also important to remember that there is a game element to this experience, and one that doesn’t carry its weight comparatively. Its best moments are mostly when its negligible or facilitating the interaction between the strange characters in this twisted sort of reality, but some ideas like the hedge maze and the theater really don’t feel like they’re helping the narrative along. Thinking of the game as a 2 hour concise experience would be much easier if there weren’t decently long periods of fiddling with a time loop or poking your nose in every part of a shifting maze, and being a shorter game means that the gameplay sections leave a larger impression than they otherwise might. These small frustrations won’t completely kill all the work the atmosphere and story-telling have done in your short playthrough of Stray Cat Crossing, but it didn’t gain much from its more obtuse gameplay moments and likely should have committed to either more simple puzzles to occupy you between story beats or really given its plot some additional layers to make its conclusion more satisfying.
It’s definitely easier to sit through a film if every part of it isn’t working for you, but with Stray Cat Crossing being a video game, sometimes you are asked to actually push through it by performing actions in the game. Some of the tight focus featured elsewhere is lost when it comes time for the player to mess around with puzzles or navigation challenges, and it dips a bit too far into its interactive elements for them just to be a means by which you experience the plot. The pixel art and soundtrack could be separated and enjoyed in isolation pretty easily, and the plot could hold together a stronger experience, but playing Stray Cat Crossing doesn’t lead to those elements shining as brightly as they could. The surreal story might still be best experienced as a video game despite the issues caused by it, but the narrative should have been the main focus, the mild challenges found in the interactive side of things a suitable sacrifice if the plot could be made more complex and provide better pay off to all the visuals. Still, a 3 dollar game that takes 2 hours to play could be an easy sell for people just wanting a bit of stylish horror, so it might have done all it needed to even if it will never reach its maximum potential because of the choices it made.