I first heard about Stray Gods via a clip I saw shared on the social media site we shall no longer name a few months ago. In the clip, voice actors Laura Bailey (who plays Grace) and Ashley Johnson (who plays Calliope) were singing a loving duet. It was intriguing viewing given I knew those actors as Abby and Ellie from The Last of Us Part 2; if you’ve played that game, you know those characters are not on the most friendly of terms. I had high hopes for what an interactive musical game could be.
The premise is that Grace, a college drop-out, is given the powers of a Muse when Calliope, a Muse with a beautiful voice, is murdered. Grace faces blame from a pantheon of Greek gods: Athena (Felicia Day), Apollo (Troy Baker, also Joel in The Last of Us), Persephone (Mary Elizabeth McGlynn) and Aphrodite (Merle Dandridge, also Marlene in The Last of Us). Grace must use her new powers to help solve the mystery of Calliope’s death, before she takes the blame.
Most scenes result in a song battle, during which Grace uses her power to elicit truths from the gods about the case. Here, you are presented with options on how to react: you can answer smartly, charmingly, or in a more ego-driven way. The flow of the song changes upon each answer, which is the best aspect of Stray Gods; by providing so many options, every song can turn out differently on replay.
The game’s musical numbers are composed by Grammy-nominated composer Austin Wintory, the Australian band Tripod (musicians Scott Edgar, Steven Gates, and Simon Hall) and former Australian Eurovision contestant Montaigne. You can see the heavy inspiration taken from Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s musical episode, Once More, with Feeling – particularly around the character of Pan, who, in his dry, curious style, sounds extremely similar to the villain who brought singing to Sunnydale.
The slick comic-style design is beautiful, and perfect for this interactive story-telling format. I loved the decision to make Eros a buff leather daddy, Hermes a non-binary teen, and the Oracle a computer nerd, and enjoyed the lighter comedic parts of the game, such as Rahul Kohli as a bumbling minotaur in love. Rent’s Anthony Rapp steals the show momentarily, his appearance late in the game coming as a nice surprise. But while the gods do feel like lived-in characters with a rich past spanning thousands of years, I still found myself wanting more from them. Overall, the character journeys felt short.
It is, forgive the pun, a Heraclean task to be able to write musical songs in a way where the lines can vary depending on the user input. Sometimes it works well, but other times it falls jarringly flat. There’s a line in the Buffy episode where one of the characters worries that a song they had just sung was not a breakaway pop hit but “more of a book number”. Playing Stray Gods, it did feel at times as though there were too many book numbers required to keep the plot going.
That being said, I found myself with the main theme stuck in my head long after I finished playing, and this feels like a fresh way to tell stories. I hope Stray Gods kicks off a whole new genre, and more from Summerfall Studios in the future.