A fascinating but flawed experiment, Stray Gods: A Roleplaying Musical fails to live up to some heavenly potential. Our review:
And what a cast! What a production team! Stray Gods is written by David Gaider with music from Austin Wintory . 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.
The game itself gives a narrative reason for this. Our protagonist is Grace, a young woman struggling to find her place in the world like every other twentysomething with a brain. After sudden events, she has the power of a Muse thrust upon her, giving her the ability to evoke music from others. This isn't just people bursting into song, its Grace manipulating others through song diegetically.Yes, Grace is a Muse and is swept up into a modern day Greek tragedy of gods and melodrama.
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. It's like an opera that's all recitative and no aria; constant musical dialogue but without pausing to ponder an emotion. By the end of my first playthrough, I could barely sing back to you a single melody.
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. As the trickster Pan, Khary Payton absolutely chews up the virtual scenery with delicious relish, while as Eros god of sex, Abubakar Salim has the most handsome, clipped voice.
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