Stray Children Deep Look

It’s a bizarre creation by an auteur and team specializing in oddities, pieced together with love and care and possibly psilocybin.

When looking deeply at a game like Stray Children, it’s important to keep in mind who masterminded it. This is a game from the same man who helped to bring the world Moon: RPG Remix Adventure, Dandy Dungeon, Chulip, Little King’s Story, Million Onion Hotel, Black Bird, and a whole lot more.

He is Onion Papa (Yoshiro Kimura), and this is his swansong. After the surprise localization and even more surprising response to Moon: RPG Remix Adventure, he felt inspired to make one more role-playing game that would capture all the magic he felt should be a part of the experience.

While the game is full of little references to other games this studio and creator have made, the biggest influence is undeniably Moon—to the point that Stray Children appears as a backdoor sequel. While it’s not strictly necessary to play Moon first, many elements of both the beginning and end of Stray Children are deliberate callbacks.

They’re baaaaack…

In this game, the player takes on the role of the Child, who misses his Papa greatly. Papa went missing some time ago, but one day his weird uncle comes by to show him Papa’s old game development workshop. Papa once made a legendary game called Crescent that hadn’t been seen or played in years, and when the computer terminal glows bright and zaps the Child into it, he and his uncle find themselves within the world of Crescent. This doesn’t last long, as the game world is literally falling to pieces, but the first apocalypse is always the hardest. After this, the Child must navigate a fairy-tale blunderland of strange and unusual places, populated by harried Children and haunted by maniacal Adults. Somewhere at the end of it all, he should find his Papa.

The big difference between this game and its predecessor is that Stray Children is actually an RPG, while Moon merely lampshades the genre. That isn’t to say that this game takes itself too seriously, either. It’s weirdly philosophical, philosophically weird, occasionally psychedelic, and has no compunction against making the player do things like flying an aerial screw with a rubber ducky head past surface-to-air cherub statues, elephant storms, and a heavy metal headbanging thunder god on drums. But it is still an RPG. There are experience levels, basic stats, usable items, and combat.

The battle system in Stray Children has alternating turns between the Child protagonist and his Adult foes. The same quick-time reaction wheel is used to land sequential critical hits, avoid specific attacks, and manage certain major events outside of combat. The positioning of the critical hit box and the total number of hits possible depends on which weapon the Child has equipped, but otherwise this part of the game mechanics remains constant throughout. It’s the Adult side of things that goes bugnuts insane.

This big ugly piggy went to hospital.

I remember reading how the maker of Undertale was a fan of Moon and took some inspiration from it. Playing Stray Children, it is obvious that the admiration was mutual. When Adults attack, the Child has to navigate the field of battle to avoid taking damage, but the nature of the attacks are idiosyncratic to the nth degree. Some Adults lay out bullet hell, and some throw around large balls or send wild animals. Others conjure thinly veiled parodies of popular arcade games for the Child to maneuver through. The rules change from enemy to enemy, and half the challenge lies in figuring out what the newest Adult is capable of doing.

While simply braining the enemy into submission with a mining tool, manhole cover, or frozen tuna fish is a reasonable tactic, in order to truly defeat an Adult, one must use the talking method. Some Adults may pose riddles or word games that need to be worked through, round after round, and others simply need a nice chat. Sometimes, all that’s necessary is the childlike tactic of repeating the same thing over and over until the Adult suffers a mental breakdown. Whatever the means, successful use of the talking method will break down the walls around the Adult’s soul, allowing them to be released from whatever’s keeping them from moving on. A released enemy will no longer appear in random encounter zones, so it’s a good thing to do in general.

Even the major bosses can be talked through, though they (and a few other, regular foes) require certain items in the Child’s inventory in order to trigger the ersatz therapy session. Bosses also give fewer clues as to whether a conversation is going the right way, so this may take some trial and error to get everything right. Hither and yon throughout the Adult Zones, the Child will come across the empty cicada-like husks that were shed as the Adults matured into their peculiar obsessions, and upon examination, the Child can learn more about the enemy and their quirks.

Nothing to see here, move along.

The graphics in this game straddle a fine line between Ghibli whimsy and Tim Burton grotesquerie, with the occasional foray into magic mushroom trips. While the backgrounds are the sort of bright and colorful artistry of a pre-rendered Playstation-era title, the character sprites are cartoonish, almost childlike renderings in sepia-tone. The soundtrack is appropriately all over the place, with each track fitting its location, but the funny part is the voice work. Same as in Moon, the developers took sound bites of volunteers speaking as many languages as they could manage, then chopping up and remixing those soundbites to produce authentic gibberish that still manages to seem like it could mean something.

We know this game is coming out in English. We just don’t know when. Presumably, the same folk who did translation work on Dandy Dungeon and Moon are doing this one, and they have their work cut out for them. There are names that need to be reinterpreted to something sensibly nonsensical. There are hints and word games that only work in Japanese.  And then there’s the Child’s uncle, the most frequently recurring NPC in the game with the most to say of anyone, who delivers all his lines in the thickest Osaka accent I have seen in a long time.

Sometimes it feels like a cliche to say that a game is ‘one of a kind’, but that really is the case with Stray Children. It’s a bizarre creation by an auteur and team specializing in oddities, pieced together with love and care and possibly psilocybin. It’s a game that doesn’t really care if it’s not for everyone, because it’s very much for the people who made it. The rest of us just get to come along for the ride.