Stray Gods is a visual novel where the gimmick is that it’s a musical and some of your dialogue choices are made mid-song, changing the course of the song. I don’t normally like visual novels, but not because I’m opposed to them in principle, just because I find it very annoying to advance the dialogue with a mouseclick every two fucking sentences. The game keeps asking me for inputs and it keeps not mattering. Stray Gods isn’t like this – the scenes just play out, voice-acted, until they reach a point where a decision is needed. Sometimes that decision is just to ask X or Y optional question or go ahead with the main plot immediately, and sometimes it’s an important choice with consequences for the plot, but either way, whenever I’m asked to interact, it’s because there’s a decision, minor or major, about how this story is going to unfold. It’s weird to me that this makes such a big difference, but it does – I’ve struggled to get through visual novels with really good writing in the past but have no difficulty getting through Stray Gods.
The premise of Stray Gods is that you are Grace, twenty-something in a band who doesn’t know what to do with her life who busts out an I-Want song, which a woman named Calliope steps in to complete. Later that night, Calliope shows up at Grace’s apparent bleeding from a mortal wound, dies in Grace’s arms, and passes on her god powers to Grace, because it turns out this Calliope is the Calliope, a muse. Calliope’s god power is that she can force people to bare their emotions in song, and Grace has inherited that power. So that song at the beginning was fully diegetic, but hey, Grace is a musician and also Calliope presumably used her god powers at some point, although implicitly only after she heard Grace start to sing. Anyway, since a god died in your apartment, the gods in charge (Apollo, Athena, Persephone, and Aphrodite – there’s been some vacancies) decide it was probably your fault, but give you a week to track down the real killer to prove your innocence. Musical shenanigans ensue!
That’s all the first, like, 45 minutes of this 5-hour game, so it’s not really spoilers, but beware that spoilers will ensue. The rest of my non-spoilery review for if you’re reading this to see if you want to play it is that the voice acting and illustration are great, the music is technically very impressive for how it interacts with your dialogue options to result in many, many different versions of each song all of which make sense and flow with each other, but in terms of actual soundtrack quality the good songs are heavily frontloaded. Pan’s song, Persephone’s (first) song, and Medusa’s song are killer, but then Orpheus’ and the final confrontation with the killer and your accuser near the end are a disappointment. Spoilers go below the break.
The game has fewer meaningful decision points than it appears to. Like a lot of these branching paths games, there’s a central story that they wanted to tell, and there are options to try and buck against that story, but taking those options will mostly be ignored. Nothing you do will prevent it from being Freddie from being the one who accompanies you in Hecate’s reliquary, where you will be attacked by the Furies and she will be killed. You can choose Pan over her in the beginning, constantly push her to stay out of things, but she’ll be the one who helps you get back into Hecate’s reliquary and she will die there.
Where most of the game’s real choices go is in the romance options. Whereas the game is totally unprepared to deal with anyone else but Freddie sacrificing themselves to stop the Furies, it can give you no less than four different characters to romance, with unique ending songs. I wound up with Apollo because, I dunno, I just kinda wanted him to get a happily ever after? The only one I even kind of gravitated towards personally was Freddie, but I walked right past the option to revive her because the initial framing suggested that the only way to bring Freddie back is if at least one other person died for it. Turns out, no, you just have to give her your god powers. Which, like, what? That’s the “great sacrifice” required? That’s not even that big of a sacrifice! Like, yeah, it kinda sucks, but we don’t even give up the god powers as a team, just change which one of us has them.
Persephone was super vague about the “great sacrifice” required, the option to ask for more didn’t have the little question mark icon that indicates “this option will give you more information but isn’t necessary” but instead had the kickass personality trait and was labeled “I’ll give anything to bring you back!” which, like, anything? No, there’s definitely some limits on what I’d give up to bring Freddie back. Freddie willingly gave up her life to protect Grace, there is a level of sacrifice past which bringing her back is just spitting in the face of Freddie’s own decision to sacrifice herself. Freddie herself kept asking me to accept her sacrifice and let go, so that phrasing on the option was really strongly worded as a rejection of Freddie’s request.
But the thing which, it turns out, is actually required to bring her back turned out to be well within the boundaries of what would’ve been reasonable to give up to revive her. C’est la video games.
This framing works if you’re super invested in the Freddie romance, if your Grace is an “I can’t bear to let you go” sort, but as someone who mostly just thought Freddie was the coolest person in this video game, it seemed kind of rude to be this dismissive of what she’d done for me and what she was asking me to do now. And that draws more attention to what choices this game thought were really important: Romance options. Once it knows that I think of Freddie as a friend and not a lover, that’s really all it wants to know. It’s not really interested in whether I would give up the specific powers that turn out to be required to revive Freddie, it’s only interested in if I would give up anything for Freddie.
The end of the game always involves the idols (the current term for the Greek gods – they aren’t very godlike, it turns out) disbanding the ruling council and going public. There’s some minor differences in who exactly gets to be on that final ruling council while it disbands, but there’s no version where you maintain the ruling council while still going public, let alone a version where you maintain the status quo at cost of your own life, let far alone a version where you avoid learning Apollo’s prophecy and thus retain your ability to defy it, since part of the mechanics of the setting is that you’re only bound by a prophecy if you know about it. There are some pretty chunky differences at the end based on who you’ve made friends or enemies of, but none of those add up to actually changing the course of the plot, which makes it all feel like lunch table politics. Does Persephone like me or not? That can vary, but it barely matters.
The game’s strong fundamentals mean that I still had a good time with it, and in fairness, they probably made the right choice here. They only had the time and budget to give one set of choices real weight, and leaning on romance options was probably the smart choice. And the game was really good at making the choices it was secretly forcing on me seem like they were just good ideas that I picked of my own volition, similar to how Valve was really good back in their heyday at making levels that naturally guided you towards going down a single linear route while implying the existence of a much larger space. It was disappointing realizing that nothing I could do would’ve saved Freddie from the Furies, but in the moment I felt like this had happened because I had chosen to get Freddie, an ordinary mortal, so heavily involved in all this supernatural idol shit.
So I don’t think any of the decisions Stray Gods made that I disliked were bad ideas – they were a consequence of finite resources and of the reality that most people are not aromantics with a mind of metal and wheels who really don’t care who Grace ends up in a relationship with, so much so that I tend to dissociate from the character completely when making romantic choices and start thinking more like “I will push the romance button on Grace because Apollo is a cool guy and I want things to work out for him.”
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