Post Script
Translating the meanings of Stray’s fictional language
Before you ever meet B-12, the hovering drone that will be your companion through Stray, he speaks to you through the dead city. First, the neon letters of an old chapel flicker on unsteadily– or rather just enough of them to spell out ‘HELP’. If we’re initially unsure whether this is a diegetic occurrence or the game blurring the lines of UI and level design, any ambiguity is quickly washed away by the next sight: a bank of televisions that show a clipart icon of a cat’s face and the instruction ‘Follow me’. We obey, and thus so does the cat.
After reaching B-12 – aprocess that requires finding the drone body, downloading his consciousness and powering it on – he speaks to us directly, the way people often do when alone with an animal. This dialogue (or rather monologue) is written out in English – afact we only mention because all around us are signs written in a glyph language, the same one used for the game’s chapter titles. There’s a narrative justification here, if you’re willing to dig: B-12 is a relic of the human era, and the glyph language was created afterwards by the robots.