Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical Review

The pitch for Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical is bloody revolutionary. An ambitious title that would allow you to engage in a semi-branching narrative musical during which certain lines in the numbers are chosen by the player. These choices would reflect your interpretation of the character, like a Mass Effect tree set to show tunes. It is a massive conceptual swing, doubly so for an independent studio out of Australia, but with legendary industry talent onboard and such a strong, cohesive vision behind the game, it was difficult to not believe in the magic of Stray Gods’ core idea. Whether or not that belief was misplaced though is another question.

In Stray Gods, you take on the role of Grace, a 20-something drifting through an uneventful life as a college dropout and indie band member. Despite a close network of friends, Grace is the embodiment of the vague sense of unease and dissatisfaction plaguing countless of you reading this. After a round of failed auditions for a new band member, Grace crosses paths with the stunning Calliope and the two share a brief but warm musical number before tragedy strikes and Calliope winds up on Grace’s doorway bleeding out. With nothing but a hushed apology, a magical essence escapes Calliope and fuses with Grace, turning her into a Muse. A magical, immortal being with the ability to pull anybody into song and invoke their inner truth, Grace is quickly whisked away by Hermes (yes that Hermes) to Olympus.

Grace’s choices take centre stage

From here, you are thrust into the world of Idols, immortal mythological figures who have been hiding their existence from the mortal world for centuries. Led by the Chorus, a collective of Idols who comprise the main cast of the game and effectively decide the laws of these fantastical beings, Idols have been systematically compromised by the modern world. Where they once reigned as literal Gods, they now operate seedy dive bars, lurk in concealed penthouses and, worst of all, stagnate in their own fear. Grace is an interloper here, an Idol by deeply suspicious means. She is immediately accused of murder and given a week to prove her innocence before she is brought before the Chorus once again and executed for her alleged crimes.

Stray Gods is a relatively linear narrative experience; each day you’ll be given access to an overworld map of the city and allowed to choose which Idol to go have a chat with, or new location to investigate. The world of Stray Gods is undeniably striking, taking the somewhat tired concept of a secret world of Gods among men and imbuing it with texture and warm tones, like a queer sheen laid over an otherwise banal template. You’ll bounce between locations regularly, the later game especially holding some treats, as you have lengthy conversations with Idols and try to piece together a timeline of events. This framing leads to some strange pacing issues though, as the game has no real sense of urgency or flow, instead happy to let you meander through various subplots in tonally dissonant order.

Static background images with a list of possible interaction points on the right make up the investigation portions, easily the least interesting of the game’s interactive elements. Often, it’s simply a case of clicking through enough of them to trigger the progression point, with Grace offering up inconsequential quips as you go through the list of stuff in any given scene. Sometimes these give you a little bit more insight into the world, most of the time it’s just another flatlined joke about how crazy this all is to Grace. It’s a strange tone to strike given the sincerity and depth of some of the game’s storytelling, with the game occasionally unable to grasp what a genuine human reaction to its world might be and instead settling on the easy wisecrack.

The ensemble cast of Stray Gods is sexy as all hell

Across Stray Gods’ ten or so hour story you’ll be chatting it up with the other Idols constantly. A revolving door of enigmatic and sultry individuals who each look like they’ve spent centuries refining their personal style, Grace’s conversations with the Idols are a bit all over the place. Summerfall Studios has crafted a dense world here, replete with countless years of lore and history and details that the game simply refuses to not talk about at every turn. There are times when this works in the game’s favour; a mid-game section sees Grace pulled into a genuinely affecting ceremony that wields the weight of this world beautifully while offering up arguably the best musical number of the game.

This moment stayed with me long after I hit credits, a shining example of what Stray Gods can achieve when it finds organic ways to interlock its world with its characters. But more often than not I found it increasingly harder to connect to the wider cast because so rarely did the game slow down enough for anyone to talk about anything other than the mechanics of the world around them. Grace plays a pivotal role in half a dozen deeply personal stories, but the emotional impact of each was dampened by either exposition, clumsy attempts at Whedonesque humour, or, most regrettably, the musical numbers.

The promise of Stray Gods’ roleplaying musical is predicated on how organic it makes controlling the flow of a song feel to the player. Musicals encompass an impossibly wide array of genres but, broadly, the core tenets of a successful one remain the same – rhythm, emotion, and lyricism. There’s maybe a world in which choosing the next line of a song doesn’t dramatically alter this chemistry, but Stray Gods rarely finds it. Instead, music often plays out in lurching halts with momentum and groove stymied by player choice. This leads to a deeply inorganic experience as I found myself torn between who I was roleplaying as and what would make for a better song; a power ballad swells to a narrative conclusion I don’t want, but to interject with my Grace’s quizzical trait would abruptly change the tempo and kill the vibe.

Some of the game’s locations are gorgeous to behold

It breaks the experience to the core, the game’s otherwise decent composition fractured by its mechanical implementation. The player is encouraged to play Grace their own way, choosing from one of three core traits in the early game that unlock specific choices during dialogue and songs throughout. It’s such a disappointingly binary way to build a character though, prematurely locking Grace out of the full spectrum of emotions in any given situation, further restricting the potential flow of a song in turn.

These dissonate tones are that much harsher given how wonderful Stray Gods can be when it finds the note. The overarching art direction is sexy and considered, landing somewhere between the raw fuckboy vibes of Hades and the sticky sweat of American Gods. The cast is largely fantastic too, doing their best to elevate even the weaker script moments with levity and playfulness. Laura Bailey’s Grace is tenacious and raw, playing beautifully off of other standouts like Merle Dandridge’s haunting Aphrodite and Khary Payton’s impossibly endearing Pan. Beyond tone, the game is also unapologetically queer, letting Grace be a true bi-disaster and offering up some meaningful and compelling plays on gender roles, identity, memory, self, and love in its many forms. Stray Gods doesn’t pull its punches here, putting forward a clear and emotionally resonating thesis on the human* condition as explored by a diverse, fascinating cast. It’s all so very, very likeable, making the finer details and the act of actually playing it all the more disappointing.

Final Thoughts

I often think about the musical episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. That cast was not particularly musically gifted, lacking convincing vocal performances and clumsily dancing through the choreography. It’s late in the show’s run and a culmination point for many of its series long plot lines, but despite all this working against it, it only concerns itself with two things – being primarily about the emotional truth of its world and sounding like a banger. Stray Gods inverts this somewhat, lining up an outrageously talented cast and having them sing through exposition and meandering plots, peppered with insightful human observations but without a banger in earshot. It’s an ambitious, likeable, and deeply flawed attempt that leaves me wondering, where do we go from here?

Reviewed on PC // Review code supplied by publisher

Click here for more information on WellPlayed’s review policy and ethics