Stray Cat Crossing is a surreal RPG Maker horror game about a girl who wanders into a house, looking to retrieve her favorite scarf, and is met instead with a host of bizarre monsters and the saddening secrets of the family within.
The game was developed by Jurlo and jetpackgone and is available on Steam here
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Stray Cat Crossing contains examples of:
- Awful Truth: Cat's parents, her unborn twin brothers, and a blind person and their dog that Cat befriended, were all killed as an indirect result of her running away.
- Big Bad Duumvirate: The game is split into three areas, and the first two have antagonists preventing the protagonist from progressing (the third has No Antagonist):
- In the Basement, the Babyface Twins are preventing the protagonist from leaving, asking her to do various favors for them and attacking her when she tries to leave.
- In the Garden, the Spider Wolves are holding the larva captive, whom the protagonist must rescue to progress.
- Bittersweet Ending: Cat learns the truth of her past, and is in doing so forced to relive it, but also manages to forgive herself for what happened and move on.
- Call-Back: Cat tells the stray cat she encounters exactly what Adult Cat tells Young Cat in the beginning of the game.
- Cat tells the blind character who acts as your save point that they must hold still in order to take a clear photo. When they take another photograph, they repeat the phrase "Hold st...still." They're not talking to the protagonist, they're reminding themselves!
- Character Title: Zig-zagged; the title refers to the protagonist, whose name is Cat, running away from home and crossing the street right before her parents crashed their car. It also refers to a literal cat, which the blind person Cat encounters is looking for, and who is the reason Cat crosses the street at all.
- Chekhov's Gun: The car that nearly hits the protagonist and Cat in the beginning.
- Delinquent Hair: Seemingly averted with Adult Cat, who seems to have dyed and cut her hair.
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: There is a great deal of dead fetus imagery in the first portion of the game, because Cat's twin brothers died along with their mother before they were born.
- Eldritch Location: The house.
- Foreshadowing: The car that drives by in the beginning and almost hits Cat and the protagonist in the beginning is the car that Cat's parents were driving when they were killed.
- Laser-Guided Amnesia: Of the sort to which horror game protagonists are highly susceptible, emerging from nowhere and causing them to forget everything in the plot that should be familiar to them, naturally including the Bad Thing They Did In Their Past.
- No Name Given: The blind person's name is never revealed.
- Parental Abandonment: Cat's parents. Zig-zagged in that this comes from the perspective of a child, and Cat's mother was expecting twins, likely causing the father to spend more time at work and the mother to spend more time preparing for their birth.
- The Runaway: Cat.
- The Stinger: Cat runs down the street, passing figures from the house as she goes, only to encounter the burning car of her parents.
- The Unreveal: We never learn the blind person's name.
