Stray: Play with mods as Garfield, dog or your own cat

Stray is already considered the surprise hit of the year. But as lovingly detailed as the game is designed: the orange fur of the four-legged friend cannot be changed.

At least if you don’t play Stray on the PC, on which fans of the feline adventure use all sorts of tricks to design the furry protagonist according to their ideas. In the past few days, more and more screenshots, clips and social media posts have been making the rounds, impressively showing what the developers (and players) have lost with their own character creation.

Lasagna instead of canned food: Stray mods let us play as Garfield

As much as we love skipping annoying microtransactions, in Stray we’re at least missing the option to customize our stray a bit more. Fortunately, the right mods can help. So it is that we are allowed to send the luxury-loving housecat Garfield on his most uncomfortable journey to date.

That’s possible thanks the mod by Chris Robino, which we can download for free from the popular Nexus Hub. But while America’s laziest fur carrier probably fits Stray’s setting best, other modders took a completely different approach. One of them, amusingly, transformed the cat we use to roam the futuristic-themed locations in the game into a hunchbacked version of Carl Johnson, better known as CJ, from GTA: San Andreas.

But that’s not all: Anyone who has always wanted to experience Stray from the perspective of a dog will not be denied this wish either. the Happy Puppy Mod, which was also created by Robino, lives up to its name. Without further ado, she replaces the meowing stray with a barking, black-and-white French bulldog.

How to even get your own cat into the world of Stray

Considering the fanatical love with which some pet owners shower their pets, the desire to get your own four-legged friend into the game is hardly surprising. Modder Sirgalahad1972 kindly fulfills this and provides a whole range of different colors and races for download in the form of his specially developed modifications.

From individual fur grains to different colored eyes to accessories, such as glasses or a cute newsboy hat, we can find it on his Nexus Mods profile all sorts of choices. Twitter user donlothario gives us an inspiring taste of what’s to come.

stray modders making the playable cat look like their cat > pic.twitter.com/2Vu7sfhA6c

— imogen donovan (@_donlothario) July 24, 2022

If you look at the cool and, above all, high-quality creations of the modders, you inevitably ask yourself why the Stray developers could have done without such an option at all. The answer delivers Producer Swann Martin-Raget in an interview with Kotaku himself. According to him, the customization options were hotly debated, but ultimately decided against due to internal capacities and the focus on the game’s story. Our detailed test will tell you how good Stray has really become.

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