A roleplaying musical. How exciting! How intriguing! So many games have mixed genres with rhythm, now it’s the turn to put narrative to melody: a musical as a video game.
Stray Gods: A Roleplaying Musical reviewDeveloper: Summerfall StudiosPublisher: Humble GamesPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out 10 August on PC (Steam), Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, PS5
And what a cast! What a production team! Stray Gods is written by David Gaider (Dragon Age) with music from Austin Wintory (Journey). It features most of the main cast of The Last of Us, including Troy Baker, Ashley Johnson, Laura Bailey and Merle Dandridge, as well as Erika Ishii, Rahul Kohli, and musical theatre star Anthony Rapp.
And it promises to please fans of both video games and musicals. I’m a fan of both of those things! Video games and musicals both as a form of storytelling, but now interactive, personalisable, immersive. Clearly I am quite excited.
For me, however, Stray Gods fails to live up to that lofty potential. Perhaps I expected too much. Perhaps these two forms of media are antithetical. The question I kept coming back to was: why is everyone singing? What does music actually add to the narrative?