Tear Jerker / Stray (2022)

• The cat's plight at the beginning of the game is worth tears as it tries to claw its way back over the edge of a drop-off, looking up at its family with fear in its eyes, before finally losing its grip with a terrified mew. It lands badly, only managing to limp a short way before fainting again. Appropriately, the atmosphere of the Dead City is bleak and empty, with only a mysterious electronic force giving you any semblance of direction.
  • What's worse is that before you venture into the Dead City, you can still hear a cat above you crying out, presumably your family. If you meow back, the other cat will cry out again. Poor kitty...
  • And it's never shown whether you ever managed to find your family again.
• Any Game Over screen can be this for some cat lovers. The cat just goes limp and rolls on its side, limbs stretched out and eyes wide open... a sight all too familiar for anyone who'd ever found their beloved pet cat dead. It's why the game's options include the ability to turn Cat Deaths off.
• B-12's fate is pretty sad too. They uploaded themself into a robot body, only to get stuck in the city's network for a very long time, so long that they lost all sense of self. Even though their important memories eventually come back, there are still many more important memories that don't come back. Even if you do get 100% Completion, they die before any further memories can be regained.
  • The cat's reaction to B-12 shutting down is pretty sad too. As the lifeless drone falls on the floor, the cat comes over and nudges it with their nose as if hoping to coax it back to life, before sadly laying next to the drone. The game is explicit in this framing: after showing the Companions' reactions to the reveal of the sky, the camera cuts back to the cat laying beside B-12 in the control room, the dome silently opening outside the window for another two minutes straight.
  • A Sequel Hook in the final shot suggests that B-12 might still be alive in the system. However, he's exactly where he started: alone in a database, not knowing if anyone will come to give him a body again, as the cat was the only one around when it occured and can't even communicate with the Companions. It's debatable whether the trauma of Brain Uploading is going to affect his memories a second time or not since he went straight digital-to-digital the second time, but if he does forget again he's going to be at a stronger disadvantage once more.
• A small, but no less powerful moment in the ending cinematic, which begins with the cat just sitting there, letting the sun wash over him. It's that little moment you realize the poor little fella was worried that his family wasn't the only thing he was worried about never seeing again.
• What became of The Outsiders when you first learn of them. Momo is depressed in his apartment, having taken down his Outsiders symbol sign, and he's completely given up on his goal of going outside.
  • Likewise, the separation of Seamus and Doc from one another. The former is bereft, embittered and driven to drink, believing his father dead and gone. The latter knows his son is all alone and mourning, because of Doc's own bad judgement in testing the Defluxor solo, yet is helpless to return to him without the cat's aid.
• A lowkey example becomes apparent as you talk to Companions and observe their behavior. At first they appear to just be typical Ridiculously Human Robots going about their normal lives. However, some of them are doing things like throwing paint cans to each other as a game, reading a two-year old newspaper, and knitting thousands of articles of clothing for others, simply to have something to do. Many of the Companions are bored out of their skulls after centuries of isolation, and they may not even fully realize it. They're just going through the motions of life because it's all they have to occupy their time.
  • More broadly, the degree to which they imitate and emulate humans is likely a result of having no more actual humans to assist or obey. For a robot race originally programmed to be humans' Companions and helpers, serving as stand-ins for extinct human beings as they interact among themselves is the closest they can ever come to fulfilling the purpose they'd been created to perform.
• Heightening the extinction of humanity is when you see Companions mimic human behavior, but often something about their actions is off, and some of them say they're doing things that they remember humans doing, but don't understand its purpose. Given that Companions seem to be The Needless, odds are a lot of their behavior can be classified this way — copying human behavior even though humans are long gone, and the Companions they left behind are still emulating them without knowing why.

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