These Stray Fans Are Cracking The Game's Biggest Code

"Stray" is an interesting little game centered around the big adventures of a cat in a cyberpunk world. Wowing onlookers during its initial announcement, the title instantly became a highly anticipated indie game for the PlayStation 5. Part of what captured fans' imagination early on was the ability to play as an adorable cat, but it was also the world in which the game was set, which seems to be inhabited solely by machine life, mutated animals... and a lost cat. Signs of humanity's influence still cling to the world in the form of long-forgotten structures or equipment. Robots and other machine life wander the streets, sit in shops and otherwise take the place of humans in their routines. Neon signs illuminate wet, crumbling streets, and each one bares an alien-looking advertisement or shop sign.

It's this world and its unknowable language that's inspired some fans to dig deeper. There's a lot that players can uncover about the world of "Stray" just through playing the game, but some have decided to take that exploration to the furthest possible extent. A few fans have been hard at work translating the mysterious language that appears throughout "Stray," hoping that they may better understand the world in which the game is set. While the "Stray" linguists haven't uncovered anything that turns the community's understanding of the lore on its head, the work has already offered some interesting insights into the mysterious city being explored from a feline perspective.

On Reddit, one user believes they've gotten pretty far in translating the mysterious language used in "Stray." User Studiotheque shared some images of their work translating various signs and other text in the game, saying, "it looks like they're using at least 3 different alphabets to make all these signs, and not all of them make sense so I've only got the first one so far." 

Studiotheque also later edited the post and pointed others with an interest in the language in "Stray" towards an Imgur post by another user, DewiMorgan, saying, "this person figured all this out much better than I did and you should check it out if you are becoming as obsessed with the lexical world building in this game as I have been." The post in question alleges to have mostly decoded the languages in "Stray," and even offers an array of examples and supporting details for the claims. 

Among the text that has been translated, signs for police stations and pizza restaurants, Dental advertisements, and even a welcome mat have all been identified. All in all, it makes this robotic world feel much more lived-in. While no one's fully cracked the languages of "Stray" yet, fans are getting pretty close — and they're getting all the more eager to discover every last secret the title holds.