Game Theory: This Cat KILLED The Human Race! (Stray)

Matt: “So let me get this straight,   you just play as a cat?” Marvelous wonderful friend: “Yeah,   that’s it, it’s great! haven’t you ever  wondered what it’s like BEING a cat?”  Matt: “No.“ Excellent Friend, definitely not writing   these captions: “Oh come on!” Matt: “I have a cat. He sleeps, a LOT.   And when he’s not sleeping, he’s just a jerk. Awesome dude: “What? Skip is a sweetheart!”  Matt: “Observe.” Beautiful Friend:   “But that was just a…” Matt:   “and again.” Amazing Friend: “…I…”  Matt: “And agai…” Friendship is magic: “Okay, okay. I get it.“ Matt: “And again.” Hello Internet. Welcome to Game Theory, the most  purr-fect show in all the Internet. Sorry. Sorry.   That last pun was a cat-astrophe. But don’t  worry, I’ll stop. I’m just kitten around.  Woo. Okay. Now that the bad puns are out of my  system, let’s talk about Stray shall we? Following   in the grand tradition of Keyboard Cat, Nyan Cat,  Grumpy Cat, and Garfield, Stray is the internet's   latest cat obsession. In it, you control a  nameless stray cat roaming around a cyberpunk city   that you quite literally fall into. It’s a good  thing that cats always land on their feet. We’re   also joined by a drone named B12, so if the cute  cats don’t get you, then the cute little robots   will. Through a variety of pushing things off  ledges, scratching on doors, and parkouring around   the city – you know, typical cat stuff – you  unlock B12’s memories and the lore of the world,   uncovering the truth of this underground city and  what happened to the humans that once lived inside   it. It turns out the surface had become a baron  wasteland, so in order to survive, the humans   fled to these underground cities, creating robots  called Companions to assist them. Eventually, a   plague developed, which wiped all the humans out.  According to a note on a wall, this was around   2,544,875,556 days ago, or nearly 7 Million  years in the past! In the absence of humans,   the Companion robots begin to evolve into sentient  machines and develop their own society. But our   friend B12 here is different. He’s special. A big  reveal of this game is that B12 isn’t just any   robot, but rather a human scientist. A scientist  who uploaded their consciousness to the Network.   This, therefore, makes them the last “living” -  quote unquote - human being. Kind of a bummer then   that, in the end, B12 has to sacrifice themself  in order to override the city’s security and open   access to the surface, which apparently is no  longer barren but instead full of green plants   and armies of cats. The final shot of the game is  our stray feline friend walking off into the sun,   as the electronic system at the edge of  the underground city comes flickering   back to life. Aaaaaand roll credits. I mean guys, all you had to do was give   me a game where I…le cat…get to purr and rub my  face on things. I don’t think anyone was expecting   this much lore when they saw a big cat on the  thumbnail! But we’re talking; a post-apocalyptic   world, a plague, 7 MILLION years of history! With  all this, what more could a gamer want? Oh wait,   I know. A theory! Because while everyone else  is gushing over how cute the game is and how   nice the ending is, I’m sitting here thinking  that this cat, that cute little floof-ball? Yeah,   he just doomed the entire world. And  it all comes down to that final shot of   the game – the computers outside the city  flickering on as our cat walks away. Now,   pretty much everyone I’ve seen play this game  has theorized that this is a sign that B12 isn’t   actually dead. That in using the network to open  up the city, B12 may have sacrificed their robot   body, but managed to upload their consciousness  to the Network and now lives on inside the city’s   systems. And you know what? That is a perfectly  valid explanation that honestly, I can't disprove.   Me, though? I ALSO have a perfectly valid  explanation that can't be disproven. And   mine is a whole lot darker while tying up  some loose ends that never get addressed   in the game. I don’t think those screen  flickers are B12. I think it’s something   WAY worse. I believe by opening up the city  we’ve actually wound up killing the planet   a second time. And all the clues are there inside  the game already pointing us in this direction.  One thing that I haven’t brought up yet  in our analysis of Stray are the Zurk,   these horrifying flesh creatures that chase after  our little floof at various points throughout the   game. We learn that the Zurk began as a bacteria  developed by humans to eat away the garbage that   was piling up in the underground city. Now, what’s  cool about this is that it’s actually something   that scientists are working on right now. In Japan  they’ve actually found a bacteria called Ideonella   Sakaiensis, which has developed the ability to eat  plastic. Let’s just hope that our scientists build   in better safety precautions than what we see  in Stray because once the humans all die out,   the Zurk suddenly grow out of control, evolving  to the point where it no longer eats just trash,   but everything in its path, including metal,  which is gonna pose a direct threat to all   our robot friends. Fortunately, we learn that the  Zurk have one weakness: UV light. This means that   when we open the city up to the light of the sun  at the end of the game, we effectively eradicate   all the Zurk in sight, watching them pop faster  than a thirteen-year-old’s pimple problem.   We’ve beaten the monsters. The robots are  safe. It’s a happy ending for everyone,   right? Eh, not quite. You see, that heart-warming  cutscene kinda glosses over the most horrifying   moment that happened earlier in the game. Down in the sewers, hidden away from any sunlight,   is the biggest infestation of Zurk, complete with  fleshy walls, bulging birthing pods, and huge   eyeballs! Again, not something I expected from a  game whose main selling point is, “become cat”.   But this, too, has backing in science. It’s been  suggested that bacteria might have the ability to   operate as a neural network, acting like the sort  of hive mind that we see in the sewers of Stray.   Bacteria can also develop more societal behaviors,  with different bacteria performing different   tasks. Some of the most notable are Biofilms  that form sticky sheets that can attach to   non-living surfaces and myxobacteria that form  bulbous pustouls, just like the fleshy walls and   birthing pods of the Zurk that we see in the game.  But, the thing that most people are forgetting is   that the biofilms and giant eyes that we see in  the sewers of Stray, aren’t affected by UV light   like the rest of the Zurk. You can swing your  cat’s UV weapon all you want, but no matter how   close you are or how long you hold the button  down, the eyes continue to just stare at you.   They cannot be killed. They have evolved beyond  their weakness to UV light. So while the ending of   the game wants us to believe that we’ve eradicated  ALL the Zurk with the UV light of the sun, that’s   just not true. The strongest of the Zurk are still  alive down there in the sewers, impervious to the   same weakness of their smaller bacteria brothers. But okay, at least they’re stuck in the Sewers,   right? Well, you WOULD be right if it wasn’t for  one important detail: THIS guy right here, hanging   from one of the walls in the sewers. That right  there my friends, is a robot. We’ve specifically   been told that the Zurk’s eat metal, we see them  try to consume Doc when you open the door for him,   we see the rest of the robots act terrified when  we first arrive in the city because they think   that we’re a Zurk trying to devour them. And yet,  this robot here is in the middle of Zurk activity,   he is literally surrounded by the stuff, and  yet, he’s still alive. He hasn’t been consumed.   Why? Well, it’s because the Zurk clearly don’t  want to eat him. Instead, they want to LEARN   from him. He’s kept down here as a prisoner.  But to understand why, we have to turn our   attention back to our new friend, B12. As I’ve already mentioned, B12 is a human   consciousness that’s been downloaded into a drone  body. The quote unquote “last surviving human”.   Prior to this, their consciousness was stored  and alive in something called “the network”.   Not much is known about the network. What we  DO know is that B12 was in it for so long,   it somehow made them able to hack into most  systems of the city, and translate the language   of the Companion robots. The only other thing we  know is that B12's human form was able to upload   their mind to the network via a white pod looking  like this. But that raises an interesting point:   we see B12’s pod in their lab at the start  of the game. And yet…there’s a second white   pod here. Clearly B12 is NOT the only person that  has uploaded their consciousness to the network.  In fact, what if I told you that most of the other  robots in this world act like humans because they   are humans…or at least have human consciousness  inside of them. In the same village where we find   the second white pod, we encounter a robot who  tells us that they “love the smell of fresh paint”   only to then remember they can’t smell anything.  That’s not something that you would fake to appear   more human, nor is it something that an AI is  just going to naturally develop over time. They   are recalling an actual memory here! Just like  we see B12 recalling actual memories throughout   the game. By collecting one of the memories down  in Midtown, we see B12 talk about how they loved   getting burgers from a particular place where the  server's name began with an “M”. If you go to the   restaurant in Midtown, the server in the burger  joint is called Mattbee. The human consciousness   that’s inside of that server robot remembered his  name. The memory is buried deep, but it’s there,   somehow influencing current actions. These robots  didn’t just evolve like the game tries to tell us,   they’re all humans that have downloaded their  consciousnesses into robot bodies. They've   existed for so long that they’ve forgotten that  they were once human. It’s why they eat food when   they weren’t built with digestive tracts. It’s  why they get haircuts, despite not having any   hair. Their human habits still take effect despite  the memories having faded millions of years ago.   In fact, we outright SEE confirmation of this in  B12’s lab. Take another look at the room where we   see B12’s Pod. The pod isn’t the only thing that’s  in there; it’s connected to a bunch of wires,   all of which are then connected to a robot  that’s sitting right next to it. The Network   was not meant to be B12’s final destination,  nor was the drone that he wound up in. Instead,   they were trying to upload themselves to  that Companion bot, except we know that the   transfer process didn’t work out completely.  They wound up inside the drone instead.  Which brings us all the way back around to our  unfortunate robot friend that’s imprisoned to the   wall of the sewer, because if you look closely,  you can see a lot of cables coming out of that   robot and going into computer monitors, ACTIVE  computer monitors. If humans were able to connect   themselves into the network and transfer into the  robots, then it’s possible that this is what the   Zurk are after as well. The hive mind can use  this imprisoned robot to access the network,   to learn from it, to potentially upload ITSELF  into the network. OR to take it a step further,   to download the hive-mind into an army of robots.  Allowing them to traverse the landscape during   the day, to reach facilities where they can then  experiment and improve the Zurk’s capabilities,   to make them completely resistant to UV light.That  is why the monitor flickering on at the end of   the game is so ominous. It’s not B12, it’s the  strain of Zurk from the sewers. The only thing   they needed was the ability to circumvent the  city’s security. And we did exactly that for   them. By opening the city, we gave them the key  that they needed to escape, and in the process   we’ve doomed all of society. Didn’t I tell you  at the beginning of the episode? Cats are jerks. But hey, that’s just a theory. A  GAME THEORY! Thanks for watching.

Channel: The Game Theorists

Views: 3,402,515

Keywords: stray, stray game, cat game, cat, cats, zurks, stray zurks, stray momo, artificial intelligence, stray ending, stray ending explained, stray explained, stray theory, stray gameplay, stray full game, stray all secrets, game theory, game theorists, matpat, game theory stray, stray trailer, stray walkthrough, stray lore, stray lore explained, stray ps5

Id: YnjZy4l4xR4

Length: 10min 35sec (635 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 06 2022

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[u/captainplatypus1]

Counter theory. The wall colony isn’t a hostile entity but a human consciousness that figured out how to transfer itself into the Zerg colony and that whole takeover is a person trying to remember what they were. It’s why the eyeballs scene are human eyes.