Matt: “So let me get this straight,
you just play as a cat?” Marvelous wonderful friend: “Yeah,
that’s it, it’s great! haven’t you ever wondered what it’s like BEING a cat?”
Matt: “No.“ Excellent Friend, definitely not writing
these captions: “Oh come on!” Matt: “I have a cat. He sleeps, a LOT.
And when he’s not sleeping, he’s just a jerk. Awesome dude: “What? Skip is a sweetheart!”
Matt: “Observe.” Beautiful Friend:
“But that was just a…” Matt:
“and again.” Amazing Friend: “…I…”
Matt: “And agai…” Friendship is magic: “Okay, okay. I get it.“
Matt: “And again.”
Hello Internet. Welcome to Game Theory, the most purr-fect show in all the Internet. Sorry. Sorry.
That last pun was a cat-astrophe. But don’t worry, I’ll stop. I’m just kitten around.
Woo. Okay. Now that the bad puns are out of my system, let’s talk about Stray shall we? Following
in the grand tradition of Keyboard Cat, Nyan Cat, Grumpy Cat, and Garfield, Stray is the internet's
latest cat obsession. In it, you control a nameless stray cat roaming around a cyberpunk city
that you quite literally fall into. It’s a good thing that cats always land on their feet. We’re
also joined by a drone named B12, so if the cute cats don’t get you, then the cute little robots
will. Through a variety of pushing things off ledges, scratching on doors, and parkouring around
the city – you know, typical cat stuff – you unlock B12’s memories and the lore of the world,
uncovering the truth of this underground city and what happened to the humans that once lived inside
it. It turns out the surface had become a baron wasteland, so in order to survive, the humans
fled to these underground cities, creating robots called Companions to assist them. Eventually, a
plague developed, which wiped all the humans out. According to a note on a wall, this was around
2,544,875,556 days ago, or nearly 7 Million years in the past! In the absence of humans,
the Companion robots begin to evolve into sentient machines and develop their own society. But our
friend B12 here is different. He’s special. A big reveal of this game is that B12 isn’t just any
robot, but rather a human scientist. A scientist who uploaded their consciousness to the Network.
This, therefore, makes them the last “living” - quote unquote - human being. Kind of a bummer then
that, in the end, B12 has to sacrifice themself in order to override the city’s security and open
access to the surface, which apparently is no longer barren but instead full of green plants
and armies of cats. The final shot of the game is our stray feline friend walking off into the sun,
as the electronic system at the edge of the underground city comes flickering
back to life. Aaaaaand roll credits. I mean guys, all you had to do was give
me a game where I…le cat…get to purr and rub my face on things. I don’t think anyone was expecting
this much lore when they saw a big cat on the thumbnail! But we’re talking; a post-apocalyptic
world, a plague, 7 MILLION years of history! With all this, what more could a gamer want? Oh wait,
I know. A theory! Because while everyone else is gushing over how cute the game is and how
nice the ending is, I’m sitting here thinking that this cat, that cute little floof-ball? Yeah,
he just doomed the entire world. And it all comes down to that final shot of
the game – the computers outside the city flickering on as our cat walks away. Now,
pretty much everyone I’ve seen play this game has theorized that this is a sign that B12 isn’t
actually dead. That in using the network to open up the city, B12 may have sacrificed their robot
body, but managed to upload their consciousness to the Network and now lives on inside the city’s
systems. And you know what? That is a perfectly valid explanation that honestly, I can't disprove.
Me, though? I ALSO have a perfectly valid explanation that can't be disproven. And
mine is a whole lot darker while tying up some loose ends that never get addressed
in the game. I don’t think those screen flickers are B12. I think it’s something
WAY worse. I believe by opening up the city we’ve actually wound up killing the planet
a second time. And all the clues are there inside the game already pointing us in this direction.
One thing that I haven’t brought up yet in our analysis of Stray are the Zurk,
these horrifying flesh creatures that chase after our little floof at various points throughout the
game. We learn that the Zurk began as a bacteria developed by humans to eat away the garbage that
was piling up in the underground city. Now, what’s cool about this is that it’s actually something
that scientists are working on right now. In Japan they’ve actually found a bacteria called Ideonella
Sakaiensis, which has developed the ability to eat plastic. Let’s just hope that our scientists build
in better safety precautions than what we see in Stray because once the humans all die out,
the Zurk suddenly grow out of control, evolving to the point where it no longer eats just trash,
but everything in its path, including metal, which is gonna pose a direct threat to all
our robot friends. Fortunately, we learn that the Zurk have one weakness: UV light. This means that
when we open the city up to the light of the sun at the end of the game, we effectively eradicate
all the Zurk in sight, watching them pop faster than a thirteen-year-old’s pimple problem.
We’ve beaten the monsters. The robots are safe. It’s a happy ending for everyone,
right? Eh, not quite. You see, that heart-warming cutscene kinda glosses over the most horrifying
moment that happened earlier in the game. Down in the sewers, hidden away from any sunlight,
is the biggest infestation of Zurk, complete with fleshy walls, bulging birthing pods, and huge
eyeballs! Again, not something I expected from a game whose main selling point is, “become cat”.
But this, too, has backing in science. It’s been suggested that bacteria might have the ability to
operate as a neural network, acting like the sort of hive mind that we see in the sewers of Stray.
Bacteria can also develop more societal behaviors, with different bacteria performing different
tasks. Some of the most notable are Biofilms that form sticky sheets that can attach to
non-living surfaces and myxobacteria that form bulbous pustouls, just like the fleshy walls and
birthing pods of the Zurk that we see in the game. But, the thing that most people are forgetting is
that the biofilms and giant eyes that we see in the sewers of Stray, aren’t affected by UV light
like the rest of the Zurk. You can swing your cat’s UV weapon all you want, but no matter how
close you are or how long you hold the button down, the eyes continue to just stare at you.
They cannot be killed. They have evolved beyond their weakness to UV light. So while the ending of
the game wants us to believe that we’ve eradicated ALL the Zurk with the UV light of the sun, that’s
just not true. The strongest of the Zurk are still alive down there in the sewers, impervious to the
same weakness of their smaller bacteria brothers. But okay, at least they’re stuck in the Sewers,
right? Well, you WOULD be right if it wasn’t for one important detail: THIS guy right here, hanging
from one of the walls in the sewers. That right there my friends, is a robot. We’ve specifically
been told that the Zurk’s eat metal, we see them try to consume Doc when you open the door for him,
we see the rest of the robots act terrified when we first arrive in the city because they think
that we’re a Zurk trying to devour them. And yet, this robot here is in the middle of Zurk activity,
he is literally surrounded by the stuff, and yet, he’s still alive. He hasn’t been consumed.
Why? Well, it’s because the Zurk clearly don’t want to eat him. Instead, they want to LEARN
from him. He’s kept down here as a prisoner. But to understand why, we have to turn our
attention back to our new friend, B12. As I’ve already mentioned, B12 is a human
consciousness that’s been downloaded into a drone body. The quote unquote “last surviving human”.
Prior to this, their consciousness was stored and alive in something called “the network”.
Not much is known about the network. What we DO know is that B12 was in it for so long,
it somehow made them able to hack into most systems of the city, and translate the language
of the Companion robots. The only other thing we know is that B12's human form was able to upload
their mind to the network via a white pod looking like this. But that raises an interesting point:
we see B12’s pod in their lab at the start of the game. And yet…there’s a second white
pod here. Clearly B12 is NOT the only person that has uploaded their consciousness to the network.
In fact, what if I told you that most of the other robots in this world act like humans because they
are humans…or at least have human consciousness inside of them. In the same village where we find
the second white pod, we encounter a robot who tells us that they “love the smell of fresh paint”
only to then remember they can’t smell anything. That’s not something that you would fake to appear
more human, nor is it something that an AI is just going to naturally develop over time. They
are recalling an actual memory here! Just like we see B12 recalling actual memories throughout
the game. By collecting one of the memories down in Midtown, we see B12 talk about how they loved
getting burgers from a particular place where the server's name began with an “M”. If you go to the
restaurant in Midtown, the server in the burger joint is called Mattbee. The human consciousness
that’s inside of that server robot remembered his name. The memory is buried deep, but it’s there,
somehow influencing current actions. These robots didn’t just evolve like the game tries to tell us,
they’re all humans that have downloaded their consciousnesses into robot bodies. They've
existed for so long that they’ve forgotten that they were once human. It’s why they eat food when
they weren’t built with digestive tracts. It’s why they get haircuts, despite not having any
hair. Their human habits still take effect despite the memories having faded millions of years ago.
In fact, we outright SEE confirmation of this in B12’s lab. Take another look at the room where we
see B12’s Pod. The pod isn’t the only thing that’s in there; it’s connected to a bunch of wires,
all of which are then connected to a robot that’s sitting right next to it. The Network
was not meant to be B12’s final destination, nor was the drone that he wound up in. Instead,
they were trying to upload themselves to that Companion bot, except we know that the
transfer process didn’t work out completely. They wound up inside the drone instead.
Which brings us all the way back around to our unfortunate robot friend that’s imprisoned to the
wall of the sewer, because if you look closely, you can see a lot of cables coming out of that
robot and going into computer monitors, ACTIVE computer monitors. If humans were able to connect
themselves into the network and transfer into the robots, then it’s possible that this is what the
Zurk are after as well. The hive mind can use this imprisoned robot to access the network,
to learn from it, to potentially upload ITSELF into the network. OR to take it a step further,
to download the hive-mind into an army of robots. Allowing them to traverse the landscape during
the day, to reach facilities where they can then experiment and improve the Zurk’s capabilities,
to make them completely resistant to UV light.That is why the monitor flickering on at the end of
the game is so ominous. It’s not B12, it’s the strain of Zurk from the sewers. The only thing
they needed was the ability to circumvent the city’s security. And we did exactly that for
them. By opening the city, we gave them the key that they needed to escape, and in the process
we’ve doomed all of society. Didn’t I tell you at the beginning of the episode? Cats are jerks.
But hey, that’s just a theory. A GAME THEORY! Thanks for watching.