Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical sounds fantastic.
Stray Gods is the debut title of developer Summerfall Studios.
“Kickass is aggressive and punk rock and powerful and in your face,” Esler told me.
“Clever is thoughtful and strategic and knowledgeable.
Charming is empathic and caring and trying to do the right thing.”
It’s a very diverse pantheon of sexy gods.
This celebration of diversity feels most evident when Grace first meets the Chorus.
And aside from all of them being hot, none of them look even remotely biologically related.
This creates more room to focus on building stories around the other gods and creatures of myth.
This is a pantheon that has been around for many millennia, and the old guard is long gone.
“But the reality is for her, that’s where her story began.
However, Stray Gods' Persephone is definitely one of the more corporate-like interpretations I’ve seen.
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“She has extremely big girl boss energy,” Ee said.
And so she’s wearing this gorgeous silk kimono-esque robe gown.
We were starting to head towards that direction.
He continued: “So we were going with this very beautiful comic book style.
Let me tell you, the level-up has been crazy.
And so, again, the project sort of shifted around to being this beautiful animatic-style cinematic experience.
it’s possible for you to get immersed in their story.”
Kind of like, you know, a musical.
One of my favorite examples of witnessing how a song can change occurred during Asterius' soliloquy for Hecate.
It’s really cute.
During songs, you have branching options much as you would with conversations in an RPG.
It’s not that much more complicated, is it?'”
Gaider said, laughing.
Turns out, it is.
It’s way more complicated.
And not just a song, but a musical.
I’m aware of how narrative changes the moment you add interactivity.
That agency, that changes the rules of narrative.
So we slowly had to figure out for ourselves."
It’s something that Gaider has wanted to do for a while.
That, sadly, never happened.
But it did provide the inspiration for Stray Gods.
“This is a nice check off the bucket list just to see, ‘How does this work?’
“No one’s done it to quite to this level before, so we’re going to see.
“We approached it from an RPG side, the dialogue side, first,” Gaider said.
“Because that part, at least, we knew we understood.
So I had to write everything around that.
But those are just narrative consequences of the song.
Summerfall Studios wanted to go above and beyond, so these options can translate into musical consequences, too.
“And that was the part that tricked me,” Gaider admitted.
“Because I’m like, ‘Okay, the [narrative] path, you could understand.’
And then they’re like, ‘Well, but a song has a through line.’
And then they said, ‘What if the first choice that we make determines the catchphrase of the song?
What if that is the through line?
And then, each time you make a choice, it makes a branch.
And so let’s say you have three choices.
And they’re telling me that this is a required thing for them to do for the song.
And I’m like, ‘Shit, that’s a lot of branches.'”
Stray Gods has a lot of strong vocal talent behind its characters.
Bailey is in her element and it shows.
You’re allowed to just enjoy the music.
and not listening, really, as much to the song itself.
I want to dance.’
All the songs happen at all the big, critical, emotional moments.”
Music is transformative, a notion that, within the world of Stray Gods, Grace can make literal.
“Song Worlds were our way of breaking reality in a very beautiful way,” Ee said.
K-pop music videos were extremely helpful.”
It was a surprisingly beautiful end to a haunting song.
“It would be a lighthouse in the darkness kind of thing, you know what I mean?
I, for one, am sold on the idea of this game.
Stray Gods sounds like an incredible experience–it’s definitely not one that I’ve seen before.
For now, however, we just have to wait and see.
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