Stray was released on PC and PlayStation a week ago, and although its story takes about five hours, many players still haven’t finished the game. Not because they haven’t finished the story, but because they’re trying to figure out the inner workings of the game’s fictional world. Trying to solve puzzles, such as how far into the future Stray should take place.
Stray is clearly set at some point in the future, as the world you travel through as a cat is inhabited by robots that were created by humans, but those humans are no more. As for how far into the future Stray might be, one player has evidence pointing to the possibility that Stray is set in a world nearly seven million years older than the one we live in now.
A droid named B-12 accompanies your cat on his journey and is able to translate some of the words and phrases you encounter along the way. At one point in the game, B-12 reads a graffiti on a wall that says that robots were created to be slaves, but for the last 2,544,875,556 days they have had souls. Mimo Shikuf has calculated that these 2.5 billion days are just under 7 million years.
If this is not easy for you to figure out, then wait until you feel the discussion that has unfolded in the comments. Another player pointed out that robots may perceive time differently than we do, pointing to some clocks found in the game that read 16 instead of 12. On the one hand, robots live in a closed city with a roof, so it’s possible that their day does not last 24 hours. However, others wonder why human-programmed robots might have a different understanding of how long a day is.
Some theories about exactly when Stray should take place are even wilder. One of them suggests that this is such a distant future that there are 32-hour clocks on Earth. Some complex calculations show that this would naturally take 584 billion years. If you’re looking for something else to do on Stray without melting your brain, you can already add in Garfield’s gameFrench Bulldog, or even CJ from San Andreas.