Become a cat in Stray, fight the zombies in Walking Dead: Last Mile, and earn points for playing on your PS4 and PS5 consoles.

Help a cat survive a strange, futuristic city in Stray

One of the summer’s surprise delights is Stray (PS4, PS5, Windows), in which you are a cat in a rundown city of the future.

The city you get lost in is a slum inhabited by robotic denizens with CRT monitors for heads. These residents have lives and you will interact with them in order to solve the mystery of what happened and so you can escape to the surface and rejoin your family.

You’re assisted by a small, flying robot that can communicate with you and translate the droids speech. It will also collect objects in the environment that you’ll need to solve the puzzles.

You use your feline dexterity to navigate hard-to-reach places, and what the developers at BlueTwelve really nailed was the biomechanics of the cat’s movement: the pause before the leap, the saunter, the delicate placement of feet.

Even the way your cat swats at an object with a slight head tilt seems entirely authentic.

There are occasional episodes where you need to run and avoid some strange, dangerous bug creatures that can hurt and kill. There’s no way to fight them – you’re a cat – so finding a way to attract them before dashing away is the only way to survive.

Published by Anapurna, I was able to play Stray because it is one of the games available as part of the Playstation Plus Premium subscription plan.

Charming and beautiful, Stray is a perfect summer distraction.

The Walking Dead: Last Mile debuts on Facebook Gaming

Fans of the Walking Dead franchise can interact with the zombie-filled world on Facebook now.

The Walking Dead: Last Mile is a massively interactive live event (MILE) developed by Genvidtech in conjunction with Robert Kirkman’s Skybound Entertainment.

Set in Alaska, the game has players creating a character, selecting a class (I made mine a scavenger) and joining one of two factions. Along with weekly story moments, you can play a number of minigames to help out your faction, and you can also participate in live events with others who are playing the game at the same time.

You can even send your character on assignments for the community – these are passive, so you don’t interact – but you are rewarded with supplies and ammunition.

The real interesting feature here is that you can spend the currency you earn playing the game to vote in the decisions made by the community that affect the story being told.

And those decisions are going to be canon in the Walking Dead universe, promises the writing team at Skybound.

Technically still in “beta”, Walking Dead: Last Mile is a bit buggy, and a bit tedious, but it is also an interesting experiment in the realm of interactive entertainment.

PlayStation shares details of Stars loyalty program

In addition to a revamped PlayStation Plus subscription program, PlayStation is rewarding people who game on its systems with a new loyalty program, PlayStation Stars

Launching later this year, players will be able to collect points by playing, by making purchases on the PlayStation Store, and by participating in various promotional campaigns.

Those points will redeemable for things like DLC, games, and even top-ups for a PSN wallet.

PlayStation Stars will be free to join when it launches later this fall.