izigame.me

Disclaimer: I've just finished my first playthrough and write the review based on that experience.
Today is launch-day for Stray Gods and I've decided to dive right in.
I've been looking forward to this since about a year by now, I think, when I first read about the basics of this game. Greek Mythology, but set in the modern day and with/as a musical? Yeah, count me in! I've played the demo when it was around and thought to myself that it's odd how the characters aren't *animated* but rather moved like maybe comic panels transitioning from one panel to the next and thought back then that maybe that was just a concept.
It is launch day. That wasn't a concept. That is the chosen art style. And while at first I found it a little odd, after a few scenes you're quite grooved in on it. It works great with the characters' art styles, since the shading and setting and everything also feels very comicbookish. The details on the characters are quite nice, everyone is fairly easy to recognize if you have some idea of Greek Mythology and some are pleasant surprises as they break with the stereotype you might have of them in your head from stories you consumed so far in whatever shape they might have taken.
The music itself is beautiful. I can't say I loved every song. There was at least one that I didn't really like. But they are all entertaining. The songtexts feel well written despite you being able to change the tone in the middle of the songs by the choices you make. It never felt out of place or like a weird transition. Some of the songs stay in your ear for a bit and I personally am not mad about it at all. I like the recurring themes as well.
The choices you can make feel like you can build up to things and while I didn't feel like I had no idea where something was going, I also didn't think I already had it all figured out either just by reading my options. There is definitely replay-value. At the very least you can get two very different stories out of this, I'm sure, depending on who you side with.
The story itself I found very intriguing as well. The way the Mythology was integrated into our modern age was well thought through and executed. I loved it. There were quite some points, too, that are still unresolved and inspire me to try and fill out the blanks the game's narration left open after my first playthrough. It encourages discussions and I loved that.
Now so much for the good parts, here are the bad parts:
Some voice lines were very, very quiet. As in I could barely at all hear them and was forced to use subtitles to read them. Now I have those on anyway, but I still found it annoying that in a full release they hadn't managed to fix the sound levels to find consistency between those. Grace is often at what I perceived as a 'normal' volume while e.g. Persephone was fairly quiet compared to her.
I was also a little miffed about one of the songs near the end feeling like I couldn't pick choices that went in a direction I wanted them to go - but that was personal taste, I guess.
Another thing that I noticed was that a lot of the songs felt like ballads while I wished there would have been a bit more different styles mixed in there. That might have been partly influenced by choices made though, so that's to be taken with a grain of salt.
The visuals sometimes felt downgraded when there were character closeups. Not that of the characters, mind you, but the backgrounds. Sometimes there were the pixels clearly visible and almost distractingly so, other times the lines just felt like they got quite blurry, sometimes there was flickering between two lines that intersected, too. But those were mostly minor things and they don't distract enough to not enjoy the songs or the story.
Altogether I'd recommend Stray Gods. I wouldn't say it's a must-play, but it was definitely a very enjoyable experience. For one playthrough, if you pause in between like I did, I guess you'd take something between 5 and 8 hours and they feel well invested. Playing it once definitely leaves you wondering what other endings you might discover.
I'd give it a 8 out of 10.