Games like Stray and Endling are creating more realistic animals - The Verge

Video games like Stray and Endling are building on the work of predecessors, including The Last Guardian, to offer more realistic virtual animals.

While an ominous blood moon hangs in the sky, four cats take shelter from torrential rain. In Stray, released this week for PlayStation consoles and PC, you play as one of these animals. A push of the left analog stick causes your cat to ease into a lilting trot; holding the right trigger makes them accelerate into a bound; then, at certain moments, you press a button to interact with your nearby feline friends. You play fight, nose rub, and curl up to them, each action beautifully animated, soundtracked with delightful purrs and trills.

By coincidence, Stray was released on the very same day as Endling: Extinction Is Forever, another game that casts you as a virtual animal: a fox in a world ravaged by environmental disaster. Where Endling is a straightforward eco-fable, Stray is a philosophical cyber-adventure. Together, these games do more than speak to our memefied affection for virtual critters; they let us ask questions through their virtual protagonists while asking questions of ourselves. In Stray’s case, the cat’s very form — a digital / electronic being posing as a biological / organic creature — feeds into the game’s subtext. Developer BlueTwelve explores the all-too rigid division we impose on nature and technology, the blurry line between artificial and natural intelligence. It’s a credit to the game’s artists, animators, and sound designers that the constituent parts of this animal coalesce into such a persuasive whole. We’re a long way off the low poly animals of yesteryear.

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Indeed, as I write this, Twitter is awash with videos of cats glued to television screens as their owners play Stray (there’s even an account dedicated to it). Their ears rotate with each chirp; their eyes track the on-screen four-legged body as it’s directed about the subterranean streets of Walled City 99. These videos could almost be outtakes from Ridley Scott’s cyberpunk classic, Blade Runner. What, we might ask, are these cats thinking as they interact with their digital doppelgangers? Perhaps a fragile sense of kinship; how about a slowly dawning horror?

Endling.

    Image: HandyGames
  

Endling, by contrast, is concerned with nothing so abstract. The game, a 3D side-scrolling adventure, opens with a devastating forest fire (like those that have just swept across Europe during a week of extreme heat) that you, a pregnant fox mother, must escape. From there, events scarcely get any easier as you venture out each night with your newborn cubs, scavenging and hunting for food while searching for your cub caught by a furrier (a person who deals in animal furs). The bulk of its story is told through the kind of environmental storytelling popularized by games such as 2007’s Bioshock. You’ll pass graffiti that reads, “Your grandson is already dead,” as the landscape gradually changes with each passing lunar cycle; towering trees become chainsawed stumps; you slink beneath hulking machines.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/22/23272850/stray-endling-video-game-animals

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