BlueTwelve Studio and Annapurna Interactive’s Stray is one of the biggest little games out now. Players take the role of a stray cat traversing the neon-lit streets of a city inhabited by robots. Critics have praised the unique adventure game for its music, gameplay, art direction, environmental storytelling, and realistic cat animations.
One notable thing about Stray is the abundance of illegible writing on signs, books, and newspapers. Of course, since cats can’t read, it makes sense that it would all be gibberish from a feline perspective. However, some Stray fans decided to go through the trouble of deciphering all the game’s text.
While BlueTwelve could have just drawn some squiggly lines and called it a day, there seems to be a surprising amount of method behind it. Reddit user Studiotheque determined that the developers used at least three separate ciphers, each with a unique alphabet. They’ve posted a gallery of twenty images showing translations of various signs and labels. And while this has yet to reveal any deep lore secrets, these translations may help players to better understand Stray’s worldbuilding and environmental storytelling.
Studiotheque has decoded the cipher developers used for Stray’s chapter titles, which they refer to as Cypher 1. It has one letter for each of the 26 letters in the English alphabet, plus an alternate “P” for a total of 27 distinct characters. Cypher 2 contains at least 22 characters, of which Studiotheque has identified the letters M, O, F, E, W, A, C, and L. The remaining 14 characters are still a mystery, however. Finally, Stray seems to use a different language for all its hand-written text. However, the Reddit user’s yet to make significant progress deciphering it.
Studiotheque isn’t the only Reddit user to translate Stray’s text. Someone with the username Dalmane_Mefoxin is working on a similar project and has translated many of Stray’s signs, labels, and even a few carpets. Studiotheque added a link to Dalmane_Mefoxin’s image gallery after another user told them about it. Fans can also find links to Studiotheque’s keys for Cypher 1 and Cypher 2 in the post’s comments, along with several screenshots of the apparent Cypher 3. While neither fan managed to compile a complete guide to decoding the mystery of Stray’s writing, they still accomplished something very impressive.
In addition to these discoveries, other Reddit users chimed in with their hypotheses about Stray’s language. One person wondered if the solutions to Cypher 2 might use a language other than English. Another suggested that the untranslated Cyphers could be an entirely constructed language rather than a simple substitution. There’s also the possibility that some of Stray’s writing is just gibberish. Hopefully, however, fans will keep working to solve this puzzle.
Stray is out now for PC, PS4, and PS5.
