Stray ending explained: What does the cat game's final moment mean?
Have we pressed the meow button for the final time?
Since its launch earlier this month, players have been heaping PC and PlayStation game Stray with praise for its unique premise and level design.
However, given Stray’s complex lore and ambiguous ending, many players have walked away from the game with more questions than answers.
In Stray, players control a cat as they peruse an underground city with the goal of escaping to the surface and re-joining the cat’s family.
However, as the ending of the game shows, leaving that city comes at a high price.
Unlike a lot of modern games, Stray does not have an open-ended final act that lets you keep on playing after the main story has wrapped up. Once the credits roll, the game is well and truly over.
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If you want to go back to pick up some more Stray collectables and earn a few extra Stray trophies, you'll have to reload a previous chapter (just try to load your game the way you normally would, and you'll see a 'chapter select' option).
If you’ve seen the Stray ending, then, we’re here to answer your key questions. Keep on reading and we’ll run through them! Stray spoilers from this point onwards.
Stray ending explained
What happens to B-12?
Things do not exactly end well for B-12, your trusty robot companion in Stray. In the final Control Room chapter, B-12 works out that the processing power it takes to override the system and open up the city will fry his little drone body.
B-12 does it anyway. He works with the cat to hack/smash into the computers in the Control Room, receiving an almighty series of electronic zaps along the way. Unable to keep going, his drone body falls to the ground. B-12 appears to die, and the cat sleeps next to his lifeless robot body for a while.
This player was hoping that B-12's garbled technobabble voice would emerge from one of the computers, revealing that B-12 survived and transferred his consciousness to a different kind of hardware. Sadly, though, nothing like this happens and we are left to assume that B-12 is really dead.
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This is doubly sad when you consider that B-12's consciousness came from the mind of a long-dead human scientist. We didn't meet any other humans in the game, which does suggest that B-12's passing may have marked the official ending of the human race. That being said, for all we know, there could be more humans/consciousnesses surviving in other parts of the world.
But still, we'll never forget B-12's heroic sacrifice. He wanted to escape the city and pass on his human knowledge, but in his final moments, B-12 said that he trusts the robot companions and animals like the cat to keep the planet going in his wake. Perhaps we'll see what that looks like if a Stray sequel ever happens.
Read more:
- Stray review - our final verdict
- Is Stray on PS Plus? Get a free trial
- Stray trophy guide - how to get that Platinum
- Stray collectables - where to find energy drinks and more
- Stray platforms - will it come to Xbox and Switch?
What happens to the city in Stray?
The walled city that you play in during the bulk of Stray's story is opened up in the final chapter of the game. The cat and B-12 make this happen by tampering with various computers. Through the big window in the Control Room, you can see a giant roof opening up to let daylight into the city for the first time in years.
Over the course of the game, it became clear that escaping the city and experiencing 'the outside' was one of the key goals for the cat and B-12, and it's nice that they managed to improve life for everyone in the city on their way out. The robots in the city can now live in less gloomy circumstances, and perhaps more of them could follow in the cat's footsteps to escape the city for themselves.
What happens to the Zurks in Stray?
In the cut-scene that plays when the city is opened, you see various characters from earlier chapters stepping into the sunlight for the first time. For the robots, this is played as a positive outcome. But for the Zurks (those scarily adorable blobs of trash-eating bacteria gone bad), the opening of the city spells certain death.
You might remember that, earlier in the game, you helped Doc make a light-based gun that could kill Zurks. It seems that sunlight has the same effect, with vast numbers of Zurks dying at the ending of Stray. We see loads of them splatter, but it's unclear if any Zurks survived — we wouldn't be surprised if they did, though, considering that some of them lived in the sewers (where the sunlight may not have reached).
For the robots and any other beings still living in the city, however, the death of so many Zurks will allow them to live their lives with a lot less fear. It's a big improvement to the robots' post-apocalyptic quality of life, making the Stray ending a happy one for sure (unless you're a Zurk).
What happens to the cat in Stray?
In the very final moment of Stray's ending, the main cat character succeeds in escaping the city. Having worked with B-12 to override the Control Room, our feline hero leaves the walled city through a big metal door that is now open.
With the player still controlling them, the cat walks along an overgrown grassy area and up a big flight of stairs. The cat is now free to explore nature, free from the confines of the city. When the player loses control, the cat simply walks off. Again, we'd say this is a happy ending.
However, now that B-12 has died and the cat no longer has its sci-fi jacket/drone combo, the cat will not be able to talk with or understand any of the robots or people that it might meet. That being said, earlier on in the game, the cat did manage to work with robots to a certain extent even when B-12 was in prison. So not all hope is lost!
It's unclear exactly what the cat will do next, or what it will find outside the city. Will the cat meet up with the other cats from the start of the game? Will the cat find other walled-off cities that need its help, opening up the door for endless Stray sequels? Will the cat find out what actually happened to the human race and the planet as a whole? Will the cat find a way to bring back B-12? For now, the answer to all those questions is 'we don't know', so let's just let the satisfying Stray ending sink in for a while. Thanks fur the memories, cat friend.
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