Stray has fully taken over the web, with seemingly everybody on my timeline at the moment taking part in the futuristic feline journey. However one YouTuber has taken what’s, to most folk at the least, a reasonably chill cat recreation and made it a lot tougher by determining a solution to beat the whole recreation with out taking any harm.
After a number of years of hype and trailers, cat simulator Stray was launched final week on PS5 and PC to rave critiques and plenty of on-line love. Folks have shortly begun modding the sport and have been sharing screenshots of the sport’s beautiful metropolis, together with movies of them simply fooling around little cats. However whereas many gamers have been leisurely exploring the richly dense world of Stray, YouTuber Hayate Bahadori was spending hours and hours practising and perfecting a solution to beat the sport with out taking harm or dying.
Based on Bahadori, it took almost 20 hours of observe and makes an attempt to drag off his July 23 no-damage run of Stray on PC. In case you’ve performed Stray, you seemingly already know what most of his time went into: avoiding all these little, annoying Zurk creatures. In truth, Bahadori says the toughest a part of the whole run occurs early on throughout the first “Zurk Run” within the recreation, the identical one tied to an achievement named “Can’t Cat-ch Me.”
“This [first run in Chapter 2] is the toughest one as a result of density of Zurks and the way tight the realm is you’re shifting via,” Bahadori instructed Kotaku.
There are a complete of three Zurk Runs in Stray, and whereas they’re barely simpler than the primary one you encounter, all three trigger issues and might finish a no-damage run. And Bahadori’s guidelines state that if any of those little buggers merely touches the cat, then it’s recreation over and he has to fully restart the run. As a result of most of Stray is devoid of hazard, it’s these Zurk Runs which are the primary barrier to beating the entire recreation with out harming a single hair on the cat’s head.
“This run mainly boils all the way down to the Zurks,” mentioned Bahadori.”When you get previous them, apart from the escape from the jail, the run is easy.”
Whereas a later recreation menace seems within the type of sentinels, the YouTuber defined that these are pretty simple to sneak round. So all of it comes all the way down to mastering the right way to dance by all these annoying Zurks.
“You really want to know how the Zurk AI capabilities and the right way to trick it into doing what you need,” mentioned Bahadori. “Understanding the A.I. and the right way to transfer via the areas doesn’t mechanically assure success since there’s a giant RNG part in the best way the Zurks spawn round you.”
One key approach he developed throughout his makes an attempt was shifting left and proper quickly, as this transfer appears to throw the AI NPCs for a loop and might help you sneak by with out getting touched.
If it looks as if Bahadori could be very, superb at beating Stray with out taking harm, it in all probability helps that that is one thing he does loads. A variety of his movies on YouTube are devoted to displaying individuals how he finishes video games like God of Conflict and Spider-Man with out taking harm or dying. Earlier this yr, he pulled off the wonderful feat of beating all of the mainline Murderer’s Creed video games with out taking a single level of harm.
For Bahadori, he does this not simply because he enjoys breaking up recreation programs and mastering them, however he additionally says he loves getting an opportunity to show of us the right way to do what he does and is all the time excited when individuals ask him questions on his runs.
“I’m a Simulation Engineer in actual life,” defined Bahadori. “[I] very a lot benefit from the strategy of breaking up video games via gameplay to determine how the sport was coded and the place I can bend the video games AI and programs to drag off a lot of these runs.”
Whereas he’s accomplished with Stray at this level, he’s now determining the right way to beat much more video games with out taking harm. He’s at the moment engaged on the Batman Arkham collection and has plans to run future video games, together with Gotham Knights and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor.
