Stray mouse pads for the desk

These Stray mouse pads and desk mats are Padrift designs inspired by BlueTwelve Studio's game about a cat lost in a city of robots, printed in high resolution over the whole surface of a 3 mm neoprene pad. The top is a soft fabric, the bottom grips the desk, and a stitched edge keeps the border from fraying. Eight desk sizes are available across the range, from an 11.8″ × 15.7″ (30 × 40 cm) pad to a 23.6″ × 47.2″ (60 × 120 cm) mat, and you'll find the ones for a particular design on its product page. Every pad is printed once someone orders it.

This page is about Stray, the video game, rather than the music group or the anime with similar names. BlueTwelve, a small studio in Montpellier, France, made it, Annapurna Interactive published it, and it came out on July 19, 2022, first on PlayStation and PC. You play an orange tabby who falls away from its family into a walled city sealed off from the sky, where humans are long gone and robots carry on in their place. With a little drone called B-12 riding on its back, the cat sets out to find a way back to the Outside.

A city seen from cat height

Stray keeps its camera close to the ground, so you see the city the way a cat would: from under tables, along pipes and air-conditioning units, from the top of a fridge or the edge of a rooftop. Everything human-sized towers overhead, and the world is full of high places to reach and narrow gaps to slip through.

That viewpoint is a useful guide for a desk design. Low angles looking up at signs and balconies give a long mat a sense of height even though it lies flat, and a cat sitting small at one end with the city rising behind it leaves the keyboard over a stretch of street rather than over the hero. It is a composition built around being small in a big place.

Neon over narrow alleys

The developers have said the city was inspired by Kowloon Walled City, the densely built enclave in Hong Kong that was demolished in the 1990s. Stray's version is stacked, damp and crowded: tiny apartments piled on top of each other, cables strung across alleys, laundry, ducts and shop signs glowing in pink, teal and warm orange through the gloom.

Those colors suit a gaming desk with lighting. A neon alley design sits well with a black keyboard and RGB set to pink or teal, and the dark background keeps the glow concentrated in a few signs instead of spreading across the whole mat. Under a warm desk lamp, the orange signs and lanterns come forward and the scene feels more like a quiet back street at night.

An orange cat on a dark mat

In most scenes, the tabby is the warmest color on screen, a patch of ginger fur against gray concrete and blue shadow. That contrast works on a desk too. Placing the cat at the end of a long mat away from your mouse hand makes it the point the eye returns to, while the darker city fills the space under the keyboard.

If your setup already has orange in it, an amber keyboard backlight, a wooden desk, a copper lamp, the cat will feel at home. On a white desk, choose a lighter design, a rooftop at dusk or a sunlit corner, so the cat isn't surrounded by a block of near-black.

B-12 riding along

B-12 is the small flying drone the cat meets early in the game. It rides in a harness on the cat's back, translates the robots' writing and speech, stores items and lights up dark places, and over the story it turns out to have a history of its own. With its compact shape and glowing screen, it is one of the clearest symbols the game has.

That makes it a good subject for the 11.8″ × 15.7″ (30 × 40 cm) pad. A single B-12, or the cat and B-12 together, set toward the top edge, stays in view while the mouse moves, and it reads as a cute robot to anyone who hasn't played. On a long mat, B-12 floating at one end with its light pointing along the desk makes a neat lead-in to the keyboard.

Meows, naps and knocked-over cans

Much of Stray's charm is in the small things the cat is allowed to do. There is a button just for meowing. You can scratch doors and carpets, rub against a robot's legs, curl up and nap on a cushion, and nudge paint cans and bottles off a ledge just to watch them fall. None of it is necessary, and all of it is exactly what a cat would do.

Those moments make playful designs for the corners of a mat: a paw mid-swipe at a can on the edge, a sleeping cat curled up in the lower left where the keyboard ends, a set of scratch marks along the border. They are quiet jokes that a cat owner understands at once, whether or not they have played the game.

Robots with screens for faces

The robots of the walled city, called the Companions, wear human clothes, keep human habits and show their feelings on simple screens where their faces should be: a pair of dots, a smile, a frown. They run bars and shops, play music for anyone who listens, and many of them dream of the Outside they have never seen.

Those screen faces are among the most graphic images in the game, almost like emoticons, and they work well as a pattern. A row of robot faces with different expressions, or one large face on a small pad, is friendly enough for an office desk and odd enough to start a conversation. It also suits a desk in tech colors, gray, silver and soft green.

Zurks and ultraviolet light

Not everything in the city is friendly. Zurks are small creatures that swarm in the dark and chase anything that moves, and in the tunnels and abandoned districts the cat has to run from them. Later, B-12 gains a device called the Defluxor, which fires ultraviolet light that destroys them. Further on, Sentinels, the city's security drones, sweep the streets with searchlights.

These parts of the game give the darkest palette: black tunnels, strange organic growth creeping over the walls and a single beam of violet light. A design built on them suits a black setup with purple or UV lighting, and it is the Stray choice for someone who remembers the chase scenes more than the cozy ones.

Rooftops and a sealed sky

From the rooftops of the city, the cat can see how far it has fallen: layers of buildings, satellite dishes, water tanks and walkways stretching away under a ceiling that hides the sky. The light up there is softer and warmer than in the alleys, closer to dusk than to midnight, with hazy oranges, browns and dull blues.

A rooftop design is the gentlest Stray look for a desk. It suits a wooden desk, a warm lamp and a plant or two, and it works for a study corner where a neon alley would be too lively. The wide horizon also fills a long mat naturally, with water tanks and antennas lined up along the back edge and open roof under the keyboard.

Playing Stray at a desk

Stray is a short, calm adventure that many players finish in a weekend. On PC it works with a keyboard and mouse or with a controller. The mouse turns the camera, and jumps happen only where the game offers them, at a prompt, so there is no pressure to aim or time a leap precisely.

That means a desk mat's job here is mostly comfort and looks. If you play with a controller at the desk, the cushioned surface gives it a soft place to rest between chapters. If you use the keyboard and mouse, the fabric top keeps camera movement smooth, and the non-slip base keeps the mat in place when you lean back to watch a long scene.

When your own cat claims the mat

Anyone who shares a home with a cat knows where it likes to sit: on the keyboard, beside the warm laptop, on whatever you happen to be using. A desk mat often becomes a cat bed by default, and a Stray mat makes that feel deliberate. The non-slip base matters more than usual here, because a cat landing on the desk at speed won't send the mat and the mouse sliding off the edge.

Be realistic about claws, though. The stitched edges stop the border from fraying, but a cat that kneads or scratches can still snag the fabric top, so keep claws trimmed or give the cat its own cushion near the desk. Cat hair lifts off easily with a lint roller.

A quiet game for a quiet desk

Stray rarely shouts. Long stretches of it are spent walking, listening and looking, with soft electronic music in the background and the patter of paws on metal. That mood carries over to a desk well. A muted design, a rainy alley or a dusky rooftop, suits a work or study desk where you want something to rest your eyes on, not something that competes with the screen.

If you share an office, a Stray design also has an advantage few game designs do: to most people it is simply a picture of a cat in a city. Only another player will know where the cat is going.

Sizes for a Stray desk

Sizes are listed on every design's product page. These are the setups each one suits.

Setup	Size	Good for
Mouse only	S, 11.8″ × 15.7″ (30 × 40 cm)	B-12 or a single robot face
Laptop desk	TCG Mat, 14″ × 24″ (35.5 × 61 cm)	The cat napping beside a laptop
Compact keyboard	M, 11.8″ × 27.6″ (30 × 70 cm)	A row of robot faces with different moods
Keyboard and mouse	XL, 15.7″ × 35.4″ (40 × 90 cm)	A neon alley with the cat at one end
Deep desk	XXL, 23.6″ × 35.4″ (60 × 90 cm)	The rooftops with the city rising behind
The whole desk	4XL, 23.6″ × 47.2″ (60 × 120 cm)	A full street of the walled city

Between them, L at 11.8″ × 31.5″ (30 × 80 cm) suits a long, shallow desk where M feels a little short, and 3XL at 19.7″ × 39.4″ (50 × 100 cm) is for a desk that wants a wider city scene but not the full depth of XXL.

Gifts for a cat person who games

A Stray mouse pad suits someone who played the game the week it came out, someone whose own orange cat looks just like the hero, or anyone who loves cats and keeps a computer desk. July 19, the game's release date, is a nice excuse, and so is a new kitten in the house. When you have no idea how big their desk is, go with the XL, which takes a keyboard and a mouse on most desks and leaves the cat room to sit at one end of the picture.

The pad is printed for the order in 1–3 business days and then shipped from Turkey; delivery to the US usually takes another 2–5 business days.

Cat hair and a clean mat

Fabric and cat hair meet sooner or later, especially on a dark design. A lint roller every few days keeps the surface clear, and a damp cloth takes care of paw prints. For a full clean, hand wash the pad in lukewarm water with a mild soap, rinse it, press the water out with a towel and leave it to dry flat, away from curious paws. Skip the washing machine and the tumble dryer entirely, and don't let an iron near it.

A note on names

Stray and the names of its characters, places and creatures are used here only to describe what our designs are inspired by. Padrift is not affiliated with, sponsored or endorsed by BlueTwelve Studio or Annapurna Interactive.