Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical Review
The most remarkable thing about Stray Gods isn’t that it’s a narrative-based role-playing musical murder mystery. No, it’s that, despite being a narrative-based role-playing musical murder mystery, Stray Gods ends up as a disappointingly tedious experience.
Stray Gods stars Grace, a singer in a band who feels like she doesn’t belong in the world – we know this because she sings about it in the game’s first of many musical numbers – but her world is rocked when she meets Calliope, who just so happens to be a muse. What kind of singer wouldn’t want to hang out with an ancient Greek goddesses who can inspire mortals in science, literature, and the arts? Except that Calliope promptly ends up getting murdered, popping her proverbial sandals in Grace’s apartment. Not before she grants Grace her muse powers, mind.
The Chorus – a quartet of gods hiding in plain sight from the modern world – blames Grace for the murder because… reasons. Grace is guilty until proven innocent and will be put to death unless she can find out who actually did the dastardly deed and did in poor Calliope. And so begins one of the most boring adventures I’ve experienced in 2023.
The tale of Stray Gods is told in the style of a comic book. Visually the game is reminiscent of a Bandes dessinées graphic novel and is frankly gorgeous, with an art style that is slick and exciting. The character design of the many NPCS you meet is striking and compelling, I just wish someone had told the voice actors to emulate that. For a game that involves a lot of talking, it’s baffling how every actor – other than Hermes, who is a vocal breath of fresh air – sounds exactly the same; bored. The voice-over work is slow, stilted, and stuffed with unnecessary pauses. There were
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