Stray is full of robots and cute cat antics, but humans seem to be completely missing from the world. The insatiable Zurks may hold the answer.
Stray has quickly become a beloved game, easily beating Annapurna Interactive’s previous record for a PC game release within 12 hours of its launch. Its story takes unexpected turns and has some emotional moments, particularly for animal lovers. Its dystopian world holds quite a bit of lore, although most of it is somewhat open-ended. One major piece is that Stray‘s world, or at least this part of it, is inhabited only by robots. There are no signs of humans anywhere, not even bodies. It begs the question, where did the humans go? The answer may lie in one of the game’s major enemies — the Zurks.
Stray has done a great job at not only being a great cat simulator but also an amazing dystopian adventure game that avoids most futuristic tropes. It takes place in a bleak city that’s been shut off from the world, literally. Completely sealed off from the surface world, it’s eternally night in the city. With no signs of humans, this underworld is inhabited by robots and creatures called Zurks that terrorize the lower levels, slowly taking them over. They terrorize the robots and eat garbage, metal and any living things evidently, as they’ll eat the cat if they catch it. The Zurks may hold the answer as to what happened to the humans.
As the game goes on, players learn that the cat’s robot friend was once human but transferred himself to a network and then into the drone. This implies that the other robots, who act very human by doing things like pretending to eat or drink and creating art and having families, may also have once been human. However, it’s unknown how they were all uploaded to these robots. This is also backed by the fact that the robots in the higher level toward the end of the game have no personalities and are just completing their assigned duties.
It’s revealed that the humans all died of a plague that spread through the city. This would explain the lack of humans but still leaves the problem of why players never encounter any bodies — not even a skeleton. However, it’s possible the Zurks consumed them. Remains may have been disposed of by cleaning bots or other humans, as the city was sealed when the plague hit and there would have been little room for graves. Initially, Zurks were bacteria created to consume garbage to deal with the issue of overflowing waste. However, by the time players encounter them in the game, they have clearly evolved beyond bacteria. They are a hive mind of small lifeforms.
It’s possible they evolved when they began consuming living tissue. There is some evidence of this in the sewers as the cat goes deeper into their territory. Fleshy webbing and tissue coat the areas where Zurks hatch from, and highly concentrated areas have human-like eyes that follow the cat and summon Zurks to its location. It’s just a theory, but it’s all players have for now. Perhaps one day players will be graced with DLC that delves deeper into Stray‘s lore.