Stray no-damage runs are likely quite a bit easier than Elden Ring ones, and one player has managed to navigate the whole eight hours of the game without taking a single bit of damage. You could say our protagonist remained in ‘purr’fect health throughout the playthrough (I’ll leave meow).
Stray has taken the world by storm, easily rising to the top of many a gamer’s best RPG list – taking down the likes of Elden Ring and God of War on its rise to internet stardom.
Eight hours’ worth of feline goodness, Annapurna’s animal adventure is hardly likely to challenge the likes of Dark Souls in terms of difficulty, but it turns out that one fan has done a full run of the game without taking a single bit of damage.
‘Paw’some or just plain skilful, YouTuber and streamer Hayete Bahadori has stunned players across the globe with their flawless Stray run, inspiring them to jump in all over again and try to match this achievement.
In order to consider the playthrough completely flawless, Bahadori’s parameters were simple: “the criteria for this run was no Zurks are allowed to attach to you for any reason and no Sentinel drones are allowed to hit you (i.e. death).”
To make things even harder, they write “at no time during the run were restarts or reloads allowed if damage or death occured. If any of these conditions were not met a COMPLETE restart of the game was required.”
Ducking, dodging and leaping their way through Stray’s neo-dystopian universe, there’s several instances where they come close to breaking their streak, but manage to pull it back at the last second. For fear of pointing out any spoilers, I won’t mention any specifics here, but check out the video above if you’re looking for some pointers.
Completing the run in just under two hours, it’ll be hard to dethrone Bahadori – but you’re welcome to try, of course. If you do, you’ll want to memorise all of the Stray memory locations, or brush up on how to decode and translate Stray’s language to help immerse yourself even further.