STAY is an emotional 2D pixel art adventure game about a kid called Quinn who is desperate and very lonely. Learn more about this interesting game in our Stay review!

 

In Stay, a computer is your guide and it will help you help Quinn escape from his hell. There is a small problem that beefs up the challenge a bit: you must guide him before the timer goes down to zero. If you decide you want a break from gaming and turn off your console, the timer will continue to run down, and Quinn will be all alone and scared without you company. You are, however, warned of this beforehand. While you’re gone, Quinn will panic, and this will cause him to lose faith in you. So trust is a heavy feature in Stay.

As you increase the trust meter levels, new dialogue options will open up. As you can imagine, with the trust meter and the different dialogue possibilities, the game offers multiple endings. I am not overly sure how many, but it offers a good amount of replayability when it comes to choosing dialogue options and seeing the results and subsequent ending. In order to gain Quinn’s trust you must always be considerate of his feelings, and not spend too much time away from him, as he needs you to survive, so you need to be there for him as much as possible.

Quinn is trapped in the tiny room, so your goal is to free him by completing and solve a series of puzzles which will help towards finding out where Quinn is located. In the beginning, the puzzles are easy enough without any need of a hint system, but the difficulty of the puzzles will ramp up considerably, and without a decent hint system in place, it might end up feeling a bit frustrating. It doesn’t make Stay a bad game, but it will certainly test your skills and make you think outside the box to find the different solutions to the conundrum at hand.

The real fun of the game is the choice-based dialogue which opens up a ton of possibilities and affects the outcome of the game – they are meaningful choices that affect how Quinn feels. The choices you make could ultimately lead to his death! You can’t, therefore, just pick and choose just for the sake of it. You will always need to think of the consequences for your choices, and I really can’t discuss what these options are since it would ruin your own experience. It’s better to go in blind into this adventure!

 

Stay is certainly a different type of experience, what with its in-game timer and how it affects the wellbeing of Quinn. Taking a break from the game for an extended period of time could prove to be fatal for him, so you’ll always need to make sure you check in on him every now and then. Other than the lack of a hint system, I definitely recommend you check this one out!

Disclaimer
This Stay review is based on a PlayStation 4 code provided by PQube.