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# Stray Cat Crossing will spirit you away and into a nightmare
- URL: https://www.killscreen.com/stray-cat-crossing-will-spirit-you-away-nightmare/
- Published: 2015-08-27T15:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2015-11-17T17:40:47.000Z
- Description: Like watching Disney movies during a bad trip Can’t sleep, baby’ll eat me Who said cartoons are just for kids? Welcome to Disney’s Midnight Channel It’s like Zelda, but…I need an adult
- Author: Michelle Ehrhardt
- Tags: News, amnesia, Five Nights at Freddy's, Horror, indie, legend of zelda, Persona, slenderman, Stray Cat Crossing, Studio Ghibli, #wp, #wp-post, #Import 2024-07-26 09:39

With the advent of let’s play channels and indie development, the horror genre has been on something of an upswing. Indie games such as *Amnesia: The Dark Descent*, *Slender: The Awakening*, and *Five Nights at Freddy’s* have become full-on sensations, spurred on by the vicarious joy viewers get from watching their favorite YouTubers flee in terror from virtual monsters. Each of these titles feature a first-person perspective and realistic environments, which frighten through immersion and make the player feel as if their own world has become a nightmare.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/previously/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/straycatcrossinginsert_big.png)

*Stray Cat Crossing* is a different kind of horror game. With a top-down, sprite based experience focused more on solving puzzles than running away from monsters, one would be forgiven for assuming *Stray Cat Crossing* were an action-adventure game along the lines of *Zelda*, but to do so would be to miss a truly unsettling atmosphere. Whereas games like *Amnesia* seek to frighten by plopping the player into a realistically rendered haunted house filled with various enemies, *Stray Cat Crossing* hopes instead to create an entirely new surreal world which unnerves through unconventional graphics and uncanny character design. Resembling a twisted version of Studio Ghibli or perhaps some of the weirder moments in Atlus’ *Persona* series, *Stray Cat Crossing* features maggots with human faces, human women with goat heads, creepy and oddly-proportioned babies in suits, and other sights designed to immerse through sheer curiosity.

Resembling a twisted version of Studio Ghibli

During the game’s animated cutscenes, these outlandish designs resemble something like whimsy turned on its head—what one might see in a children’s storybook after staying up for 72 hours straight. If *Amnesia* uses realistic graphics to make its horrors more believable, then *Stray Cat Crossing* uses stylized graphics to make the player question their own sense of reality.

[*With the full release coming to Steam on August 28th, you can get spirited away to this bizarre new world by playing the free demo available now.*](http://straycatcrossing.tumblr.com/?ref=killscreen.com)