Of Cyborgs and Cats: Nonhuman Companionship and the Specter of Humanity in NieR: Automata and Stray

Games such as NieR: Automata and Stray utilize nonhuman avatars to navigate post-apocalyptic landscapes, ostensibly offering a post-humanist perspective on the aftermath of the Anthropocene. While these titles present themselves as explorations of nonhuman companionship and recovery, they ultimately fail to transcend human-centric frameworks. Instead of dismantling traditional hierarchies, these narratives function as a form of identity tourism, where the player engages with nonhuman experiences through a lens of human privilege. By prioritizing individualistic consciousness as the pinnacle of existence, these games reinforce the very neoliberal capitalist values that precipitated the environmental and social collapses depicted within their worlds.

The core of this failure lies in the persistent elevation of human-like individuality as the primary metric for worth. Nonhuman entities are portrayed as meaningful only when they mimic human emotions, social structures, and capitalist modes of being. Collective or non-individualized entities are frequently framed as existential threats, further entrenching the belief that human exceptionalism is the only viable path for survival. Consequently, these narratives sanitize the realities of systemic exploitation, masking the precarious nature of a future where human-driven destruction may have already rendered long-term recovery impossible.

Ultimately, these games serve to memorialize human exceptionalism rather than subvert it. By framing the survival of cyborgs and animals through the prism of human-centric privilege, the gameplay reinforces the capitalist structures responsible for global ruin. Rather than providing a radical vision of a post-human future, these titles suggest that nonhuman life can only find value by emulating the systems that caused the world’s destruction, thereby perpetuating the cycle of exploitation under the guise of progress.