Catching Strays

I haven't backed a ton of crowd-funded games, but enough to have a surprisingly wide array of reactions to the completed product. For a few I've been very active during development, even trying out Early Access and giving feedback. Sometimes I jump on a game as soon as it's launched. Other times it hangs out in my Steam queue for a while before bubbling to the surface. And there are a few that I never do get around to playing. 

 

"Stray Gods" falls into the "bubble to the surface" category. I backed this game what feels like ages ago, in The Before Times. It came out last summer; I think that at the time I was deep into Elden Ring, then from there into Baldur's Gate 3, then back into Elden Ring again, and what with one thing and another it fell off my radar. But as I finally have some down-time I was able to pick it up. Fortunately it's one of my favorite things, a Not Too Long Game, and I was able to finish it over a course of several pleasant days of chill playing.

 

Stray Gods is the first game from Summerfall Studios. Despite being a brand-new (Australian!) operation, they're staffed with industry legends. The entire reason why I backed Stray Gods (which had some other title at the time that I can't currently recall) was due to the involvement of David Gaider, my all-time-favorite video-game writer. Gaider wrote huge portions of Baldur's Gate 2 (possibly still my favorite RPG of all time), and created the Dragon Age setting (possibly my favorite fantasy game setting of all time), and has consistently been insightful in his public postings and speeches. Gaider was a pioneer in video game romances, which are especially dear to my heart, and has been an outspoken champion for increased representation in games alongside other forms of media.

 

I remember seeing a talk a few years back where Gaider mused over how odd his career path has been. The stereotypical progression is that someone will work on a personal passion project to try and get noticed, then hopefully get to work for a small indie team to actually ship a title, then graduate to a major AAA studio to work on a big game that millions of people play. Gaider has spent years working in AAA games, and feels relief and delight at stepping "down" to a smaller, more personal studio.

 

Stray Gods has a great hook: a roleplaying musical. Inspired to some extent by the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "Once More, With Feeling", this is a game where encounters are resolved through powerful and emotional musical verses rather than through combat, stealth or spellcasting.

MINI SPOILERS

In the game, you play as "Grace", a young woman who becomes a mythological Muse. As a Muse, she has the power to inspire people, to stir them to action or draw out truth from them. Nearly all of the characters in the game are from Greek mythology: mostly gods and goddesses, with a few other beings mixed in. It's set in the modern world, and feels a little like American Gods in the way that these ancient beings brush up against contemporary society.

 

I think it's helpful to come to this game understanding "roleplaying" as meaning "playing a role" and not so much as denoting traditional RPG elements. The actual gameplay is pretty light, even more so than something like Pentiment; if you imagine a visual novel you're most of the way there. You can shape Grace's character to a limited extent, in particular by giving her one of three personal strengths. Throughout the game, "Red" options denote ones that are forceful (brash, aggressive, in-your-face); "Green" options are empathetic ones (being friendly, making people like you); and "Blue" options are questioning ones (investigating, curiosity, digging deeper). Certain dialogue options will be blocked off based on what trait(s) you chose, but for the most part you can respond as you like, picking options that match your perception of Grace or that feel most appropriate to the situation.

 

The game is fully voice-acted with amazing voice actors. Dialogue plays out similarly to BioWare games like Mass Effect or Dragon Age: you listen to conversations, with occasional automatic speech from Grace, and eventually come to a dialogue wheel type of thing where you can select a question or response. I've only played through the game once, but it seems that at least some choices are highly reactive; asking questions seems to mostly just give more lore and flavor but probably doesn't change the story as much.

 

They main "gameplay" unfolds during songs, which are key set-pieces. Usually something dramatic is happening here: Grace is trying to avoid some harm or convince someone to do something for her or to discover something. Unlike regular dialogue, there's a timer that appears during a prompt, and you'll have a limited amount of time to make a selection. (What happens if you fail to make a choice? I don't know! I was too scared to let it happen!) Your choice here seems to feed into the music - "Red" aggressive responses will modulate to a more intense sound, while "Green" friendly responses will generally be more peaceful - as well as changing the dialogue and what happens next. That said, I'm pretty sure that story-wise the last choice you make in a song decides what will happen next in the story.

 

A little bit of gameplay unfolds when navigating around a city map - this actually reminded me a lot of the recent Vampire: The Masquerade visual novels from Draw Distance. And there are a few scenes where you pick from various items or people in a room to interact with. In both cases, you usually end up needing to exhaust every option, or at least do a few until a new choice to proceed opens up.

 

I haven't read anything about the game, and will probably research at least a little after publishing this post, but I get the strong impression that it's impossible to "lose" at Stray Gods. Your choices have consequences and things can turn out in different ways, so you may end up more or less satisfied with how things play out, but I don't think you'd ever, like, run out of HP and view a "Game Over" screen.

 

There are technically "romance options" in the game, but at least in my playthrough, it's a bit lower-key than what you would expect in a 100+-hour RPG. Romance choices seem to mostly be about expressing how your character feels about someone else, not necessarily leading to reciprocation. More on this below in mega-spoilerville.

 

Heading into a bit more detail (but still no major spoilers yet):

As mentioned above, most of the characters here are from Greek mythology. I've recently been thinking about the phenomenal game Hades, and it was interesting to see so many of the same classic characters appearing in both games. In most cases, their presentation in Stray Gods is significantly different, both from their Hades depiction and their traditional portrayals (with the necessary caveat that these characters have had a lot of different portrayals over the millennia, or even among the ancient Greeks). I'd say that, in general, Hades tended to portray exaggerated versions of the pantheon's stereotypes, while Stray Gods tends to subvert those stereotypes. (Or, maybe it's more accurate to say that Hades exaggerates the Olympians and subverts / reinvents the Chthonic gods.) Some specific characters like Persephone are almost polar opposites, others like Hermes go in very different directions.

 

One minor complaint: Some of the songs have awkward scansion, with what feel like too many or too few syllables in a line, forcing the singer to speed up or draw out different parts. The singers themselves are fantastic and handle this well, and maybe it would seem better without the (default) subtitles. I noticed this more often in the earlier songs. I may have gotten used to it, or maybe it was intentional and shows how Grace and the people around her are getting better at singing and songcrafting as her powers grow?

MEGA SPOILERS

I'm honestly not sure if I'll replay this, but I am curious just how much changes based on your decisions. It feels like there are some major differences based on early decisions you have on favoring one character over another: in particular, there's one conflict between Freddie and Pen, and another between Persephone and Apollo. I went with Freddie and Persephone and spent a lot more time with both of them than the other two, so I suspect that if I went the other way, Pan would be following me around on stakeouts and Apollo/Oracle would be giving me directions.

 

It looks like those four (Freddie, Pan, Persephone and Apollo) are the romanceable options, at least based on who has heart options pop up for them. I always chose the heart for Freddie and didn't pick it for any of the others, though if I had it to do over again I'd be curious how Persephone responds, now that I know more about her history with Calliope and seen how she acts away from Apollo. Something Terrible happened to Freddie late in my game, and I'm super-curious if that's a canon outcome, or if it was because I had indicated that she was the most important person to me. (What kind of a monster would design a game like that?!?!)

 

 

The primary plot is pretty interesting, with a good pace of discoveries and a few twists, but I found myself even more interested in the background plot, basically everything that has happened between Ancient Greece times and the present. One item is a big time gap, a period of about a thousand years after Zeus summoned the gods for a war; we know that the gods existed during this time and were doing stuff, but nobody remembers what happened during that time. I'm a little curious whether this points to a Neil Gaiman / Terry Pratchett-esque system where deities' existence and power is contingent upon the belief of their followers, and so during the Dark Ages when the ancient texts were "lost", the gods fell into darkness as well; and after being rediscovered in the Renaissance, they became relevant once again, but diminished due to their smaller presence in the popular imagination.

 

Another major plot point concerns the physical relocation of the gods from the Old World to the New World. The game is vague about exactly where it's set, but based on some context cues it seems to be America, and I imagine more specifically Manhattan; but from the gods' perspective any country other than Greece would probably qualify as a New World. Anyways, while the dialogue avoids explicitly stating some of these details, it sounds to me like what happened was: Ares felt annoyed at missing out on all the warfare of World War 1, so he revealed himself to the Axis and supported them in militarizing and rushing towards World War 2. With the gods revealed, they became vulnerable; in particular, Aphrodite was captured by the Axis. Her (unappreciated) husband Hephaestus then approaches the Allies and offers to help them construct the nuclear bomb; in return, the Allies help free Aphrodite and grant all of the "Idols" safe passage to the New World. Anyways, with all of these intriguing backstories I feel like Summerfall is in a pretty good place to set up a potential sequel or prequel to explore this world and these times in more depth.

 

Oh yeah, quick sidebar (which could have been in Mini Spoilers...) - even within the game, they aren't super clear on why the present-day mythological beings are known as "Idols". To me it seems like a corruption of "Eidolon", which is the enduring aspect of a being that passes from host to host when the previous one dies. Of course, "Idols" in the 21st century tend to conjure images of big, showy singers, which is very appropriate for the game. 

 

Anyways, since the relocation the Idols have been "safe" but have not been thriving at all. They've been shocked to discover that they can now be slain. Their powers are diminishing, and so on. This seems to be the animating force behind Athena, who takes desperate measures to try and reverse the decline.

 

I really really really really liked how Athena was the antagonist of this game but not a full-on villain: there are reasons why she acts the way that she does, and you can eventually show her the error of her ways and redeem her, without needing to physically destroy her (though I did also appreciate that there is an option to punch her in the face!). I love this style of story, in all mediums, and want to see more alternatives to "the game ends when you murder the bad guy."

There were a few minor plot things that I was left curious about at the end; I strongly suspect that these aren't "plot holes" so much as things that could have been explained if I had ventured down different conversation paths than I took. First, I'm not sure why Hecate was wrong about the future; multiple times she was surprised by things that happened when she shouldn't have been. Maybe Athena used her access to the Reliquary to rewrite some of her books? Possible, but also odd; I don't know why Athena would add a detail like Grace becoming Calliope seven months in the future instead of, say, writing that Grace murdered Calliope and will be put to death in a day. There are some references to Fates, so maybe Athena was able to change the future and Heccate's books just haven't been updated? That seems implausible, but I'm not very clear on the rules of this world. Or maybe Grace herself has some ability to change her own fate? That feels a bit more likely to me, in particular in the context of us playing this video game.

 

I'm also not sure how Athena got the ability to summon the Furies. I think that classically, the Furies only got involved for kin-murder, which doesn't seem to be the case here; again, the game doesn't need to adhere to classical tradition. I think someone makes a comment about how Zeus would have been able to summon the Furies, and I wonder if Athena was able to take some of these types of powers (without the other Idols knowing) in Zeus's absence. I get the strong feeling that there's an answer to this somewhere in the trial scene song.

 

Random note: Early on I had Athena pegged as the most likely killer, and was mildly pleased to be right. I definitely didn't have the whole plot figured out, but given who was in the cast and who seemed able to be eliminated and generally intuiting how these things go served me well.

Other random reactions:

My favorite song was Aphrodite's.

My favorite character was Freddie.

 

My favorite Idol was Asterion.

 

My favorite location was Underworld.

 

My favorite voice actor/actress was Grace.

END SPOILERS

All in all, Stray Gods was a delight. It's a perfect palette cleanser between some huge chunky RPGs I have played and will play, but it's very carefully crafted and lovingly made. The quality of the performances and attention to detail are much higher than you would expect from a game at this price point. It's also pretty nice to have an "RPG" that's ALL story, which is the part that I usually like best anyways.