I thought it would be fun, with my focus this month on using AI tools for blogging, to have GPT-3 interview me about my experiences playing the recently released cat adventure, Stray. What follows is the unedited transcript. I have to keep prompting it to stop it from trying to complete both sides of the interview.
I recently played the game, “Stray”, a game where the player is a cat trying to escape a futuristic city inhabited by robots. Please ask me questions about my experience playing the game.
How did you feel while playing the game?
Toward the start of the game, just the experience of being a cat and doing cat things was enough. I loved the feeling of almost passive malevolence as I scratched at rugs and doors and tried to trip robots, and was smiling when I found that some puzzles needed those catlike skills to solve! Ask me another question!
What did you think of the graphics?
The graphics were fine. The cutscenes were done in game, so it was a natural flow between the opening of a level and the actual play. Now that I think about it, each level — from the outside prologue, to the slums where we spent a lot of time, the Zurk-infested sewers, the tree-focused time in Anthill, the city center of Midtown, and the antiseptic lifelessness of the control center, all seemed like very different games, and a lot of that was due to the innovative use of lighting in these areas. Warm in the slums, neon in Midtown, fluorescent in the control center… very different feels. Ask me another question!
Did you find the game difficult?
No, not really. One of the trophies you can get is to finish the entire game, start to finish, in two hours. I didn’t come anywhere near that. If I hadn’t spent so much time in the slums trying to complete a few collection quests, I’d have been done much sooner. The Zurk invasions were the most difficult part, but even then, I learned how to deal with them — and another trophy admits that you don’t actually need to kill any of them, if you’re good enough. Ask me another question!
Did you like the story?
Well, I thought going in that this was going to be a story about a cat that got separated from his family and was trying to return to them. That didn’t happen. Toward the start of the game, I met a drone named B-12, and it then largely became its story as it tried to remember its past and complete its mission of opening the city. So it was kind of a bait and switch. In those parts of the game where the cat became separated from the drone, the game makes you really feel you’ve lost a part of your character, as I was no longer able to communicate with the robots, nor read signs and stuff. I guess the main character was really the cat/drone combo. Ask me another question!
Did you like the ending?
There was never any doubt that the drone would succeed in its mission. We do find out the drone’s big secret about midway through the game, though anyone who’s seen the really similar in a lot of ways Detective Pikachu would have long before figured it out. A bit of a spoiler, I guess — in the end, you’re just a cat, alone, again, and it feels like something is missing. And the ending is a little bit vague about whether or not the cat’s mission was ever fulfilled. Ask me another question!
What was your favorite part of the game?
Well, I did like the ending. Again, don’t want to spoil it, but that ending cutscene was amazing. My favorite level was the slums. That was the only part of the game that really felt like it could use and appreciate more cats. Ask me another question!
Would you recommend this game to others?
Sure, any cat lover should immediately go get this. It was included with my Playstation Plus subscription, so it didn’t cost me anything besides a few hours Saturday morning. I don’t know if I need to rush to replay it. I missed a lot of collectibles and flubbed some other trophies, so if I were a completionist, I’d probably play it through once more for the trophies, and a third time for the speed run trophy.
I streamed the whole game on my Twitch channel. Obviously, the stream spoils everything.
Typical of an interviewer wanting to taint the interview with its own agenda! 😉 Sounds like a fun game.
I enjoyed it 🙂