Hmmm I am not sure that this is the correct take. Let me preface this with a spoilers throughout warning and also that some of it is mishmash because I added in some bits and pieces from memory and cba proofreading for clarity.
First argument is that it lifts the aesthetics of the walled city, ok yes, so what? It's a cool setting and they make a different walled city with that as the reference point for how it might look. I'm ok with it given that the point is humanity had to build this walled city to survive something created by capitalism.
It's made pretty clear that the robots in Stray are poorly imitating humans. Their ideas of how humans behaved are wrong and this is quite explicitly stated. If anything I see the clothing and behavioural choices of the robots as an intentional commentary on what shit looks like when ignorant people imitate something without actually understanding it.
This author has zeroed only some of the robots while completely ignoring ye olde english bartender, the black-coded robots, the muslim robots, and so on. All are extremely exaggerated stereotypes. One of the robots is covered in tattoos. One wears a wig. There's a barbershop and yet nothing to barber, they literally just sit and pretend to do the barbershop stuff despite no haircutting. The clothing worn by robots is 1950s in some places and then 2020s in others.
The robots grasp on humanity is tenuous at best and that's deliberate, I think they got their understanding of humans from human entertainment, possibly videogames but can't confirm that. This theory comes from the large number of "easter eggs" present in the game, the doctor is clearly based on back to the future and even references lines from the movie, there are references to videogame lines throughout. All the robots in the prison are also named after famous crime bosses from movies. Given the fact that the robots have very tenuously imitated humans and that their grasp may have come largely through entertainment media I think it's not particularly surprising that it's really all over the place.
I argue that literally every character in the game is a caricature and that the decision for them to have ridiculous conical hats in somewhere completely out of place was quite intentional. There is a certain unspoken attention to detail in the world building throughout the game and the hat choices being out of place aren't just "haha asian robots" in my opinion. The imitation isn't limited to race or religion either, poor imitations of gender coding are present throughout the robots imitation of humans, and a parent and child relationship between two full sized robots is an explicit component of the main story. They are imitating a family. I noticed this parent/child relationship between the robots and took note of it at the time because my immediate thought was "chuds will totally accept that this robot is the child of this other robot but won't accept trans people self-identifying".
I do not think you can evaluate just these hats being out of place without also contextualising that within basically everything the robots do being out of place in a world where these NPCs are just imitations of humans. The only thing that doesn't feel like an imitation in this world is the cat and your companion B12, the last actual human.
Honestly I love this take, especially how B-12 makes side comments on how the robots adapted and yet kept so may habits of humanity (such as maintaining a meaningless class divide between the slums and midtown because that's what the earlier humans did so I guess we should do that too even though we are robots).
That particular line is a wonderful take on the insanity of many things the humans do that should absolutely not be copied to a new society whatsoever.
Yup, overall I hope a sequel is made or something sequel adjacent (hell maybe you play as a dog in the next one) that shows the breaking away from a previous society and its trappings (don't know if the devs can facilitate something like that but annapurna is a good publisher to work on something like that with).
Not having played Stray, it sounds like Stray's robots are similar to the robots in Nier: Automata in that they are copying humanity (good and bad) in a (futile?) attempt to understand what it means to be human
The origins are much less explained in Stray. Also you're a cat, more of the setting is intended for the player to figure out via observation - like a cat. You're supposed to look at the world and see it from cat perspective and I suspect to a certain extent you're not supposed to understand it fully because you're a cat.
There are a few hints in the game though - spoiler alert, but in the beginning of the game you see a machine connected to a robot. Later on, you learn that this is a machine used to upload your consciousness into a robot. Most likely, the robots are human consciousnesses that lost their memory like B12
Too many of them are just obviously robots doing a routine for literally no reason. Only the outsiders really make sense as potential humans imo, mentioned in more detail here .
I'm not sure. They seem fundamentally different from the robots in the control center, for example, and it seems that some robots exhibit behaviours that weren't learned and were fundamentally human (for example, the robot that talks about a smell and then is confused at how he can remember a smell). But for me it's really seeing the robots in the control center, having no issues doing useless work for thousands of years and seeming inhuman that did it for me
They have no humans around them, which means they just do their thing. There is a memory that explicitly states that the robots started to break their programming by copying and imitating humans before the humans were all gone. With no humans around them to imitate nothing influenced them.
They understand pretty well what it means to be human - they are fundamentally human in their essence, they just don't know much about the history of humans as it was lost to time
I don't think you can justify that they're human. Never wondered why there are millions of bottles, and drinks all over the place? It's explained as imitating the humans even though they don't even drink. All of the behaviour of most of the robots is just mega corrupted completely pointless actions that serve no purpose.
I mean, yeah, they can't drink and are just trying to imitate. But I think there is something more to it - in the ant village there is a robot that talks about he liked a smell and then caught himself and said something like "wait, I can't even smell". I think there is something to part of those behaviours being faint memories they kept and the rest being imitated as you said.
I'm inclined more towards the creative robots being formerly human. The ones that seem to be able to have independent thoughts and plan things, like the Outsiders who plan to escape the city. Or in your example, the creative painters.
I don't think the musician robot for example is a former human. They don't do creative work, they can only do copying from the music sheets and have played the same things for thousands of years.
i seriously thought the robots were all just mind uploads like B12 that nearly completely lost their human memories over time, through data degredation, or because they were copied repeatedly. didn't realize i misread that they were just imitating recorded culture.
I had this theory too at one point but I couldn't justify it, their imitation of humans is too janky on the vast majority of the robots. I think that if any of them are formerly humans then it's the Outsiders group and only that group, I need to go and investigate some of the other pods for clues to who the owners of the pods were. I personally lean towards the idea that some humans attempted to do consciousness uploading but it went wrong and didn't work, then the cat came along and found this consciousness trapped inside the PC screaming for help and we uploaded it to B12. I think the rest of the humans in that project for consciousness upload probably died otherwise they would have helped B12 themselves.
I think another analysis here is that the humans that died on the lower levels left behind a human society, with human entertainment and shit. The robots over time changed because of the environmental influence of their surroundings (human class society) and then slowly but surely became these imitators we see now over millions of years (this is 5million years in the future according to a note I found in game). I find this analysis the most compelling because the robots on the highest level, the control level for the rulers of the city, are not human at all. They are in the most sterile environment, with no influence around them, and they have had nothing of human culture or influence to copy or change them over time. I think this is a commentary on the middle-income and destitute classes of society being the most human, that the highest level of society is the least human. It's worth noting that there is a memory file in the game to find that specifically states that the robots started imitating the humans before the humans were gone which I think adds to this theory.
Also with theories about the worldbuilding I think everyone is overlooking
spoiler
the lifeform that the Zurks spawns from. The hundreds of giant terrifying eyeballs we saw is one giant lifeform and uhhhhh something more is going on with that beyond just "bacteria made to eat stuff", feels sort of gravemind-like. This lifeform is presumably not dead and has just been released from the city by us escaping which concerns me.
it would make sense for the outsiders. i never played it but just watched a letsplay with my partner so some things were missed. i know we saw 2 or 3 mind upload pods are there more?
spoiler
and unlike the little bacteria/waterbear zurks the eldritch superorganism seems utterly unfazed by UV radiation!
I think I definitely saw 2, possibly saw 3 pods, really not sure if there were more though and need to pay more attention. I'm not necessarily sure they should be considered "mind upload pods" though, they could just be longterm cryo for a body too and the only mindupload place may have been at B12's.
spoiler
utterly unfazed by UV radiation!
Yeah this was very noticeable. It isn't going to be affected by the sun. The small ones that spawn might be but it can clearly spread elsewhere. This opens the door for a sequel where the cats and other things in the world are affected by a spreading biological terror.
In the very beginning of the game you see a pod connected to a robot body, so it's clear that the pods are actually mind upload pods. Presumably the upload failed and
spoiler
that person instead got stuck in the network and inhabited B12
I mean. At the surface level a conical hat being out of place in a cyberpunk city IS exactly what this author is saying, and common in the history of the cyberpunk genre.
But at a deeper level I actually think these devs know that, and I think they know about more problems that others may pick up on and write about if they only do a surface-level analysis. I believe that it was intentional to include these hats knowing they're typical of the genre and I believe that the choice to make it less-bad by making all the characters robots doing a poor imitation of humanity is probably a conscious decision by the devs.
I actually think the level of thought the devs are on here is that the cyberpunk genre itself is tropey, full of caricature and a poor imitation of humanity. The game is really dense with detail and I find that the more corners I look in the more things I might find.
Also I'm convinced that
spoiler
B12 isn't dead and was actually uploaded into the city itself and now controls the entire city. B12 opened the city exit for you and I think the game has been left open for a sequel.
As far as the robots learning from video games, it could just be a reference but it's worth mentioning that a robot who runs a coffee shop is named Sojiro lmao. That MIGHT not be a deliberate Persona 5 reference, but so many of the others are references that it feels like there's a good chance it is
I think they can be both deliberate references based on robots learning from entertainment and easter eggs as well. It's a good way to pander to people while explaining away all the pandering with references as having an in-world explanation.
Hmmm I am not sure that this is the correct take. Let me preface this with a spoilers throughout warning and also that some of it is mishmash because I added in some bits and pieces from memory and cba proofreading for clarity.
First argument is that it lifts the aesthetics of the walled city, ok yes, so what? It's a cool setting and they make a different walled city with that as the reference point for how it might look. I'm ok with it given that the point is humanity had to build this walled city to survive something created by capitalism.
It's made pretty clear that the robots in Stray are poorly imitating humans. Their ideas of how humans behaved are wrong and this is quite explicitly stated. If anything I see the clothing and behavioural choices of the robots as an intentional commentary on what shit looks like when ignorant people imitate something without actually understanding it.
This author has zeroed only some of the robots while completely ignoring ye olde english bartender, the black-coded robots, the muslim robots, and so on. All are extremely exaggerated stereotypes. One of the robots is covered in tattoos. One wears a wig. There's a barbershop and yet nothing to barber, they literally just sit and pretend to do the barbershop stuff despite no haircutting. The clothing worn by robots is 1950s in some places and then 2020s in others.
The robots grasp on humanity is tenuous at best and that's deliberate, I think they got their understanding of humans from human entertainment, possibly videogames but can't confirm that. This theory comes from the large number of "easter eggs" present in the game, the doctor is clearly based on back to the future and even references lines from the movie, there are references to videogame lines throughout. All the robots in the prison are also named after famous crime bosses from movies. Given the fact that the robots have very tenuously imitated humans and that their grasp may have come largely through entertainment media I think it's not particularly surprising that it's really all over the place.
There are robots that are holding the newspapers upside down.
I argue that literally every character in the game is a caricature and that the decision for them to have ridiculous conical hats in somewhere completely out of place was quite intentional. There is a certain unspoken attention to detail in the world building throughout the game and the hat choices being out of place aren't just "haha asian robots" in my opinion. The imitation isn't limited to race or religion either, poor imitations of gender coding are present throughout the robots imitation of humans, and a parent and child relationship between two full sized robots is an explicit component of the main story. They are imitating a family. I noticed this parent/child relationship between the robots and took note of it at the time because my immediate thought was "chuds will totally accept that this robot is the child of this other robot but won't accept trans people self-identifying".
I do not think you can evaluate just these hats being out of place without also contextualising that within basically everything the robots do being out of place in a world where these NPCs are just imitations of humans. The only thing that doesn't feel like an imitation in this world is the cat and your companion B12, the last actual human.
Honestly I love this take, especially how B-12 makes side comments on how the robots adapted and yet kept so may habits of humanity (such as maintaining a meaningless class divide between the slums and midtown because that's what the earlier humans did so I guess we should do that too even though we are robots).
That particular line is a wonderful take on the insanity of many things the humans do that should absolutely not be copied to a new society whatsoever.
Yup, overall I hope a sequel is made or something sequel adjacent (hell maybe you play as a dog in the next one) that shows the breaking away from a previous society and its trappings (don't know if the devs can facilitate something like that but annapurna is a good publisher to work on something like that with).
deleted by creator
I'm definitely going to check that out
I'll have to give it a look, I really enjoyed Lain and thought it was one of the few great techno futurist animes out there.
Not having played Stray, it sounds like Stray's robots are similar to the robots in Nier: Automata in that they are copying humanity (good and bad) in a (futile?) attempt to understand what it means to be human
The origins are much less explained in Stray. Also you're a cat, more of the setting is intended for the player to figure out via observation - like a cat. You're supposed to look at the world and see it from cat perspective and I suspect to a certain extent you're not supposed to understand it fully because you're a cat.
There are a few hints in the game though - spoiler alert, but in the beginning of the game you see a machine connected to a robot. Later on, you learn that this is a machine used to upload your consciousness into a robot. Most likely, the robots are human consciousnesses that lost their memory like B12
Too many of them are just obviously robots doing a routine for literally no reason. Only the outsiders really make sense as potential humans imo, mentioned in more detail here .
I'm not sure. They seem fundamentally different from the robots in the control center, for example, and it seems that some robots exhibit behaviours that weren't learned and were fundamentally human (for example, the robot that talks about a smell and then is confused at how he can remember a smell). But for me it's really seeing the robots in the control center, having no issues doing useless work for thousands of years and seeming inhuman that did it for me
They have no humans around them, which means they just do their thing. There is a memory that explicitly states that the robots started to break their programming by copying and imitating humans before the humans were all gone. With no humans around them to imitate nothing influenced them.
They understand pretty well what it means to be human - they are fundamentally human in their essence, they just don't know much about the history of humans as it was lost to time
I don't think you can justify that they're human. Never wondered why there are millions of bottles, and drinks all over the place? It's explained as imitating the humans even though they don't even drink. All of the behaviour of most of the robots is just mega corrupted completely pointless actions that serve no purpose.
I mean, yeah, they can't drink and are just trying to imitate. But I think there is something more to it - in the ant village there is a robot that talks about he liked a smell and then caught himself and said something like "wait, I can't even smell". I think there is something to part of those behaviours being faint memories they kept and the rest being imitated as you said.
I do agree that some of them may be uploads.
I'm inclined more towards the creative robots being formerly human. The ones that seem to be able to have independent thoughts and plan things, like the Outsiders who plan to escape the city. Or in your example, the creative painters.
I don't think the musician robot for example is a former human. They don't do creative work, they can only do copying from the music sheets and have played the same things for thousands of years.
Neir vibes was my first impression of the robots as well.
i seriously thought the robots were all just mind uploads like B12 that nearly completely lost their human memories over time, through data degredation, or because they were copied repeatedly. didn't realize i misread that they were just imitating recorded culture.
I had this theory too at one point but I couldn't justify it, their imitation of humans is too janky on the vast majority of the robots. I think that if any of them are formerly humans then it's the Outsiders group and only that group, I need to go and investigate some of the other pods for clues to who the owners of the pods were. I personally lean towards the idea that some humans attempted to do consciousness uploading but it went wrong and didn't work, then the cat came along and found this consciousness trapped inside the PC screaming for help and we uploaded it to B12. I think the rest of the humans in that project for consciousness upload probably died otherwise they would have helped B12 themselves.
I think another analysis here is that the humans that died on the lower levels left behind a human society, with human entertainment and shit. The robots over time changed because of the environmental influence of their surroundings (human class society) and then slowly but surely became these imitators we see now over millions of years (this is 5million years in the future according to a note I found in game). I find this analysis the most compelling because the robots on the highest level, the control level for the rulers of the city, are not human at all. They are in the most sterile environment, with no influence around them, and they have had nothing of human culture or influence to copy or change them over time. I think this is a commentary on the middle-income and destitute classes of society being the most human, that the highest level of society is the least human. It's worth noting that there is a memory file in the game to find that specifically states that the robots started imitating the humans before the humans were gone which I think adds to this theory.
Also with theories about the worldbuilding I think everyone is overlooking
spoiler
the lifeform that the Zurks spawns from. The hundreds of giant terrifying eyeballs we saw is one giant lifeform and uhhhhh something more is going on with that beyond just "bacteria made to eat stuff", feels sort of gravemind-like. This lifeform is presumably not dead and has just been released from the city by us escaping which concerns me.
it would make sense for the outsiders. i never played it but just watched a letsplay with my partner so some things were missed. i know we saw 2 or 3 mind upload pods are there more?
spoiler
and unlike the little bacteria/waterbear zurks the eldritch superorganism seems utterly unfazed by UV radiation!
I think I definitely saw 2, possibly saw 3 pods, really not sure if there were more though and need to pay more attention. I'm not necessarily sure they should be considered "mind upload pods" though, they could just be longterm cryo for a body too and the only mindupload place may have been at B12's.
spoiler
Yeah this was very noticeable. It isn't going to be affected by the sun. The small ones that spawn might be but it can clearly spread elsewhere. This opens the door for a sequel where the cats and other things in the world are affected by a spreading biological terror.
In the very beginning of the game you see a pod connected to a robot body, so it's clear that the pods are actually mind upload pods. Presumably the upload failed and
spoiler
that person instead got stuck in the network and inhabited B12
Happy hexbear account birthday btw 🎉🎊
Central African timezone users rise up
And you! 🎉🎊
thanks :anarchy-heart: :wink:
Understandable, it seems like the article might be lacking some needed nuance then :xi-gun:
I mean. At the surface level a conical hat being out of place in a cyberpunk city IS exactly what this author is saying, and common in the history of the cyberpunk genre.
But at a deeper level I actually think these devs know that, and I think they know about more problems that others may pick up on and write about if they only do a surface-level analysis. I believe that it was intentional to include these hats knowing they're typical of the genre and I believe that the choice to make it less-bad by making all the characters robots doing a poor imitation of humanity is probably a conscious decision by the devs.
I actually think the level of thought the devs are on here is that the cyberpunk genre itself is tropey, full of caricature and a poor imitation of humanity. The game is really dense with detail and I find that the more corners I look in the more things I might find.
Also I'm convinced that
spoiler
B12 isn't dead and was actually uploaded into the city itself and now controls the entire city. B12 opened the city exit for you and I think the game has been left open for a sequel.
As far as the robots learning from video games, it could just be a reference but it's worth mentioning that a robot who runs a coffee shop is named Sojiro lmao. That MIGHT not be a deliberate Persona 5 reference, but so many of the others are references that it feels like there's a good chance it is
I think they can be both deliberate references based on robots learning from entertainment and easter eggs as well. It's a good way to pander to people while explaining away all the pandering with references as having an in-world explanation.
Thanks for the context