Stray Gods: A Roleplaying Musical review
And what a cast!
What a production team!
Stray Gods is written by David Gaider (Dragon Age) with music from Austin Wintory (Journey).
And it promises to just 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?
The game itself gives a narrative reason for this.
By the end, I wasn’t convinced Grace ever found her true purpose.
The Idols, meanwhile, are trying to find their own place in the modern world.
It’s all very American Gods with some cliched characterisation and choices.
Aphrodite (Merle Dandridge) is the classic diva.
So how does this actually play?
Stray Gods is a visual novel, with the player choosing dialogue options to mould the story and progress.
This in turn unlocks specific dialogue options as Grace questions the Idols.
The problem is these choices have little bearing on the plot beyond added colour.
A second playthrough had minor changes, but the story is fundamentally the same.
In musical numbers, however, choices do matter more.
It’s here that Stray Gods is most innovative, but also where it fundamentally stumbles.
As the musical conversations unfold, the music constantly shifts with each new fragment of melody and dialogue.
The way the music evolves to match the mood is clever and improvisatory, but also fleeting and ungraspable.
There’s little repetition or typical song structure.
By the end of my first playthrough, I could barely sing back to you a single melody.
Frustratingly, there is some wonderful music here, once you take a beat to tune in.
Seductive jazz, rock and electronica are inflected with classical orchestration and mandolin for a hint of the ancient.
It’s often downbeat and dour, but there are sometimes flashes of soulful melody and rich vocal harmonies.
His terrible rhyming poetry may not sound overly tuneful, but that’s the point.
Your experience could also be different to mine.
Your choices could lead to different melodies, different instrumentation.
The narrative outcome, though, will likely be the same.
As a player and a listener, there’s little melody to cling to.
Stray Gods accessibility options
Subtitles available in large or small font.
Content warnings: alcohol use, violence, PTSD, death, suicide.
What’s also missing is a sense of theatricality.
When we go to a musical, we want to experience live performances.
Instead, Stray Gods falls flat.
Its visuals present the story as a graphic novel in thick blacks and bold colours.
As a result, we focus in on the vocal performances alone, for better or worse.
The talented, well-known cast have perhaps been chosen for their acting ability rather than singing.
They speak Gaider’s smart dialogue with confident, characterful inflections.
The spoken sections are lively and energetic where the sung vocals lack dynamics.
Some performances do impress.
And Troy Baker’s rough, breathy rock voice is well-suited to the emo Apollo.
So why was everyone singing?
Well it’s a musical, so of course they were.
That lack of cohesion means the story never hits the lofty, emotional heights it’s aiming for.
I just wish it had a good tune.
