Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical – An Unusual Genre Combination
We’ve seen some unusual genre combinations, but Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical immediately caught my eye for being a supernatural murder mystery visual novel musical; as far as I can tell it’s a one-of-a-kind video game, but an idea that we can only hope will become more common because of how boldly bonkers it is.
Choose Your Response and Impact the Story with Music
There’s a magical moment when characters – both mortals and the gods of Greek myth – burst into song and you can choose your response, which impacts how your character feels, affects how other people respond, and even changes the lyrics of the tune you’re helping create. Musical battles evolve to a whole new level when you can decide who sings and how they’re expressing their emotions.
Great Voice Acting and Art, but Predictable Story
Inevitably, the initial thrill of choice starts to wear off the more you play, and the story and characters’ predictability make the overall experience fall a little flat, but even so, it has plenty of wonderful art and top-notch voice acting to keep you entertained through it all.
Play as Grace and Clear Your Name
You play as Grace, voiced with moxie and flair by The Last of Us star Laura Bailey. She’s a college dropout who finds herself in the wrong place at the wrong time and falsely accused of murdering a muse of the gods.
A Talented Cast of Voice Actors
Just as you’d hope for in a musical, which depends on every character being able to belt out a tune, the voice acting is rich across the board. Every line is voiced, often by recognizable talent.
Underwhelming Character Interpretations
For such a fantastical story, though, I was a bit underwhelmed by the overly safe interpretation of the characters. If you’re going to explore Greek mythology, I want to see something new done with characters like Athena, Pan, and Persephone; I want to be enchanted by discovering new sides to these gods and to their established storylines.
Simple Gameplay and Accessible Experience
As a positive, the gameplay is extremely simple and accessible, to the point where it feels like an interactive TV special. You’re mostly looking around places for clues and deciding if you want to charm, interrogate, or sneak past other characters or obstacles. You can choose violence… or you can be more subtle. You select Grace’s dialogue choices, and during tense song battles, these choices are timed – though it’s still low-stakes in that there are no real consequences if you fail to make a choice in time – it simply picks one for you.
Beautiful Art and Captivating Songs
The art, though, is absolutely fantastic. The hand-drawn characters look distinctive and vivid, in bold lines and fashion choices. The color schemes of the backdrops, whether it’s a lair or a luxury apartment, are also a feast for the eyes. The original songs could fit right into a Broadway show and the voice actors deliver heartfelt performances.
Potential for Replayability
While the murder mystery plot’s true culprit was a little too obvious for my taste, and that never changes, there’s potential for replayability in that Grace’s dialogue options are guided by whether you’ve chosen to play her as Clever, Charismatic, or Kickass, and that decision makes scenes play out very differently.
A Bit Too Emotional and Bleak
One of the draws of video games is that they offer a level of escapism, but Stray Gods dwells on too many sad emotions for me. It just feels a little bleak, especially if I spend too many hours in this world.
A Worthwhile Experience
It’s worth going through at least one more time to see if you can date other characters and to spend more time with characters you may have bypassed on the first run. And the only technical issues I ran into were occasional failures to save my progress. Even someone who has never picked up a video game before could, in theory, enjoy Stray Gods.