I really wanna say mean things about it Stray, but lots of people are enjoying it so it's probably just not for me.
I tuned out pretty hard when I saw that its platforming is "on rails." Ended up quitting maybe 30 minutes in. Very boring to me.
I would literally rather play Mario 64.
I have yet to play Stray, but I am looking forward to it. I am a cat person and graphically it looks quite beautiful, and to be honest, the fact that it is on rails is and not an overly long game is a positive for me. I like both open world games like the Assassin's Creeds, GTAs and all that, but there is always room for more narrative-driven games that take you from set-piece to set-piece in a linear style, like the Uncharted series does. If that's Stray's style, I embrace it.
Open worlds are great when done right, but can be a slog when done poorly. For example, I am currently playing through the PS5 version of Immortals: Fenyx Rising. Graphics are beautiful, story is decent, and humor is admittedly hit-or-miss (though mostly hit), and the world is pretty much completely open. Only two parts of the game world are locked off until near end-game conditions, but otherwise, if you've got the stamina, you can climb and access any part of the map. It's negative is that the gameplay can be downright tedious. When you're not doing a storyline quest, then you're exploring the map hunting down chests that usually require some kind of boring puzzle solving to open. And then there are countless tedious dungeons that are basically just puzzle areas where you're pushing, pulling or carrying giant blocks or balls to the right spots to light up a crystal to move onto the next boring puzzle. The open world was great, but because they didn't fill it with anything interesting, I think I would have rather played an on-rails game instead.
Isn't Mario 64 generally recognized as an all-time great game?
It is, but let's face it, it's not because it's genuinely a great game, but because people look at it through rose-tinted glasses and it was an incredibly ground-breaking title
for its time. Kinda like Star Wars; boring freakin' series, but revolutionary for 1977 audiences who've never seen such a thing in their life before and we're had to suffer with the hype surrounding it for decades afterwards because of that.
Mario 64 took a beloved mascot whom even non-gamers have grown to recognize over the previous decade and done something relatively new; put him in a fully 3D environment, which most people hadn't seen utilized in such a way before. It had controls that were worlds ahead of other 3D games at the time -- but are downright clunky by today's standards. It had a camera system that was intuitive for it's time, but is incredibly unintuitive today. It had bright, detailed cartoony graphics that were pleasing at the time, but appear boxy and full of low-resolution textures (when textures even appeared) today. It's gameplay was open and encouraged exploration, but let's be honest, it was slow and by today's standards, tedious.
I criticize Mario with all due levels of love, though. I was a Nintendo fanboy from the NES all the way to the N64 and even still have
this little guy dangling from my car's rearview mirror even today. But I've taken off my rose-tinted glasses when it comes to Mario 64. Not Super Mario All-Stars, however, those glasses will never come off.
ing Atlus strikes again.
