izigame.me

I've been waiting for Stray Gods since the first moment I've heard about it and now that I have 4 runs of it under my belt I feel ready for a review.
First off a few things that might be misleading from the trailers and should be cleared up:
- It's not what most people (myself included) would call an "RPG". "RPG" evokes skill trees and levelling up, strategic battles and exploration. There's none of that here. It is TECHNICALLY a Roleplay as you will interpret the protagonist, Grace, in the way you best see fit, but there are no RPG mechanics. It's a Visual Novel, through and through.
- It's not an actual murder mystery. Some games that revolve around murder mystery solving will have you actively look for clues and ask the players to find the murderer, possibly getting the wrong one or leaving the case unsolved. This is not the case here, the story will evolve regardless and the case will be solved. So... no need to take notes or wrack your brain, this isn't what the game is about.
With this in mind, Stray Gods may be defined as less of a "game" and more of an "interactive graphic novel". You'll have plenty of choices that will affect HOW things develop but not WHAT the events are. The conversations that you'll have may be quite different, the events may change, but you'll still go from point A to point B in the same way regardless of your choices.
Having said that, I wouldn't say that the choices don't matter, because they will affect the epilogue of basically each and every character in the story: you can't change the course of the story, but you can change the ending of specific character arcs. While that may not seem like much, I can almost guarantee that you're going to care because the characters are all well-written and easy to like, helped by the stellar voice acting that is the core of the game (even if sound balancing of some lines is all over the place). I may be biased as Laura Bailey and Troy Baker are my favourite VAs in general, but this game is just packed with the best, and even characters that have very little space in the story end up being memorable thanks to good lines delivered perfectly (e.g. Medusa). Still on the characters, being a VN it does feature the mandatory romance options: there are 4 in this case, and I found that all of them were very good options. So... have fun and explore them.
Before moving to the juicy part of the game, which is the music, a mention of the graphics side: the graphical presentation of the game gives it a very "graphic novel/comic book" style, also because it uses mostly still images, there are no animations. The colors are bright and vibrant, there are lots of nice details on the art, and each character design is very well-defined and diverse... but during the conversations it can get a bit repetitive to see the same character artworks in the same poses over and over. During the song acts, instead, there's a lot more to see and it's much more interesting.
So, the song acts... there are plenty and with lots of possible outcomes to them. As shown in the trailers, you'll have up to 3 choices at certain points of the songs, and your choices will affect the "mood" of the song, and possibly its overall outcome. What is important to know is that in some cases EARLIER choices affect this too: it's not just that every segment of a song has 3 possible variations, there are MANY more that you can discover by playing out the whole song differently. I also bought the 4 soundtracks to the game, and some sections that I played out by picking different choices are not found in any of those. The variation you can have is just that massive. This definitely took a lot of work and is played out wonderfully in game, making the song sections very interesting.
The songs themselves are, like in every musical, not always the best: some are true masterworks that will remain in the back of your head for days, others not so much, but even at their worst they are a good listen and very appropriate for the narrative... maybe just not that catchy or memorable.
In a bottom line comment Stray Gods features an interesting art style, a wonderful cast of characters brought to life by a wonderful cast of voice actors, a story that works, and some great musical pieces. I found myself wanting to explore all the choices and outcomes, and I think that many others might want to do the same. If it sounds like something you might enjoy, go for it.
There are a few things that I found to be missing, though. Not flaws in and of themselves, but features that would have been welcome in my opinion:
- More save slots and the ability to manually save the game. As things are, you cannot just save before a splitting point to have an easier time getting all the endings and exploring choices. As it takes a minimum of 5 runs to get all endings, and a run is around 5 hours long... I would have liked being able to get a few shortcuts.
- A gallery feature where one can access the artworks, see journal entries, and replay songs without having to go through 4+ hours of gameplay maybe just to try a new variation on a specific song.