Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical Review

Game: Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical
Genre: Musical, Adventure, Visual Novel
System: Steam (Windows) (also available for PlayStation, Xbox, Switch, Epic Games Store, Humble Games, and GOG)
Developer|Publisher: Summerfall Studios | Humble Games
Age Rating: US T | EU 12+
Price: UK £24.99 | US $29.99 | EU € 29,99
Release Date: August 10th, 2023

Review code provided with many thanks to Plan of Attack.

Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical is exactly what it sounds like from the title: you are in a musical, visual novel where nearly everyone sings along with the story.

A scene like a play; the Minotaur is on the ground looking up at Hecate on a balcony. Behind them is a painted scene of a starry night sky. — You get to help people with your singing express themselves and tell the truth.

Big Voices, Beautiful Terrain

Stray Gods is one of the most unique titles I’ve played in a long time. This RPG/Visual Novel takes place in a modern city. A girl named Grace unwittingly inherits the powers of a Greek god, and she needs to prove she didn’t kill the god for their power. You inherit the ability to have people sing the truth, and you must start digging into who killed the original Muse.

Grace stands with blood on her hands, her eyes glowing with golden light. — You gain the powers of a Muse.

Every bit of this game has a hand-drawn feel; it reads a lot like a comic book that you are interacting with. A kind of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure story with murder, deception, and many songs. I am not usually a huge fan of visual novels, but I really wanted to give this one a try. In part because I heard some of the developers from Dragon Age: Inquisition were part of the Summerfall Studios dev team and in part because this game looks stunning, unique, and quite entertaining.

Content warnings for Stray Gods include elusions to suicide, drinking, and PTSD. — Anything that makes games more accessible is good in my book.

If nothing else, Stray Gods delivers a gaming experience like you have never seen (or heard!) before.

There Are Four Soundtracks

Grace, her friends, and everyone she interacts with are forced into singing along with the songs as they are introduced. It’s a bit like living in a musical; characters even comment on how odd it is that they are suddenly singing.

Pan is speaking; he has goat horns and purple sunglasses on. — The characters are so wonderful.

Stray Gods has a massive amount of songs, and each one is unique, stunning, well-sung, and feels like old-timey bardic music tales sung before a fireplace in a tavern. The game picks you up and dumps you into the tangled, long-lived, and brutal world of the Greek gods, leaving you to rise or fall through massive decisions. Who do you trust? Who do you keep close, and who do you push away?

There are so many songs in the game that it fills four soundtracks. Four. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, but it is a massive amount of music. Each song tells a tale, and each song is beautiful. The voices in this game are amazing. If you love musicals, you will hum along to these tracks for days after your playthrough. Maybe even launch into a ballad or two about the dishes while your cleaning up after dinner.

Three hands snap in tandem, next to a microphone — There are so many songs in Stray Gods.

Choose Your Own Path

There are many choices in Stray Gods, and each one alters the ending and the interactions you get to have with others. Every choice gives you new songs, new places, new characters, and new dialogue options. There are three distinct ways to play the game: you can choose to be optimistic, charming and clever, or someone who is always ready to kick butt. Depending on which you choose initially, it will change the dialogue options you can access.

Grace has thee choices to keep the conversation moving, then a four choice is grayed out. — There are so many choices I couldn’t make; I will need to devote the next and forever getting to all of them!

What’s really both amazing and extremely cruel of the devs is that you can see the choices that you can pick. If you decide to be aggressive, you will see some greyed-out charming or optimistic choices that you just don’t get access to. It’s amazing, and I think I will need to play Stray Gods all the way through three times. Dang it, Summerfall Studios! How could you do this to me!?

The scene is a nightclub in full swing. Grace has the choice to talk to four different people, Apollo, Hermes, Pan, or Eros. — Choices, choices.

The Pros of Stray Gods

Where to even start with this? It’s a beautifully drawn, amazingly voiced, and lovingly rendered story. I love the music, the acting, the characters, the voices, the script, the choices! It is such a stunning game from start to finish, and there are so many ways to go about investigating the death of the Muse. I kind of just want to break into a song, belting out Stray Gods’ praises to the heavens.

A gorgeously appointed, expensive-looking apartment living room filled with art and instruments is topped with a ceiling painted like the sky. — Explore the environment.

This game is hilarious. There are so many funny scenes between the characters, each of them so full of life and unique personalities. And it’s super accessible; there are copious content warnings and other options, so just about everyone could play and enjoy it. I absolutely fell in love with everything about Stray Gods.

Grace can choose between talking to Apollo, traveling to see Persephone, or going to visit Pan. — Choose your path.

I cannot recommend this game enough. I won’t even bother with a Cons section in this article because I don’t know what I would even say against it. It’s fun, well-priced, replayable, beautiful, and filled to the brim with gorgeous music. What more could RPG, visual novel, and musical fans want? It’s so well polished that I can’t think of a single thing that I would change or add.