Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical is truly the first game of its kind, combining branching story elements with interactive songs. The title is the debut from Summerfall Studios, which was co-founded by former Dragon Age head writer David Gaider, and is published by Humble Games, which has been involved with critically-acclaimed releases like Slay the Spire and SIGNALIS. As protagonist Grace, players will explore a unique narrative about the Greek gods while making choices both in and out of musical numbers that can drastically affect the ending.
Grace finds herself facing the Chorus after she's blamed for the death of the Last Muse, Calliope, who upon her death transfers her powers to the player. Granted one week to prove her innocence, Grace will interact with characters from mythology like Pan, Athena, and Apollo as she seeks out the truth. As a muse, she can coerce information out of others through song, which becomes the main investigative tactic. The soundtrack comes from award-winning composer Austin Wintory, who helped to create songs that can go in several different directions - a number can become a slow ballad or angry rock song mid-way through based on player choices.
Screen Rant sat down with Stray Gods' creative director David Gaider to discuss solving musical puzzles, venturing into a brand-new genre, and the future of the game.
I saw you mentioned on Twitter recently that there were a good amount of story elements that were cut from the game - can you talk about what any of those were?
David Gaider: It wasn't a lot, considering. But we initially planned for Stray Gods to be maybe two or three hours, and somehow it ballooned into five or six, or maybe even a little bit longer for some people. But I had bigger plans. I think the biggest thing that was cut is when you go to see Pan for the first time, Grace sort of appears on the rooftop and mentions ing through the building. Originally, there was an entire section of the game where you don't just go to see Pan, you go to Olympus the building.
You arrive, and Grace is with Freddie and sees the various gods, gets to meet a few of them like Hestia, Dionysus, and a few things like that. We had a plan for additional songs to take place in a quest line with Dionysus, so that would have been cool. But ultimately, when we were looking at the scope, we were like, "Oh, this is quite a bit bigger than we had planned." And that was probably the section that was like, "Oh, I kind of liked the idea of Grace meeting these extra characters, but they are extra." So it was sort of low-hanging fruit.
The last time we spoke, you touched a little bit on collaborating with Austin Wintory, but I would love to hear more about the recording process and what it was like to tackle this really unique musical puzzle with Austin.
David Gaider: The main thing I think was that we had nobody we could ask for advice; there was no game. Normally when you do something you look at other games, you play some, and you're like, "I like this aspect. I don't like this aspect." I know that there were some people that played the game, like one reviewer was like, "Well, I would have done X and Y differently," and and I read that I was like, "If I'd made the game over again with the benefit of hindsight, I too would have made a few different decisions." But really it was a lot of trial and error.
Austin was great. He was sort of the perfect collaborator for this because he'd had sort of a dream of interactive songs, even before we approached him. So jumped in with both feet and had the kind of experience we needed; I don't think we could have done it without him honestly. The big trick was figuring out how we were going to approach writing the songs; like there was the issue of making them work from a mechanical standpoint so that when you make decisions there wouldn't be a hitch in the audio as it switched tracks and things like that.
And musically, if you went from charming to kick ass, that it would blend into the new tune, and you wouldn't get a sense like, "Oh, suddenly we switched over to this more aggressive track." It wouldn't sound natural. That was all on Austin's plate, and he had a pretty good handle on how to do that. If you listen to him explain it, it's super complicated. But from the creative side, we had to figure out how to approach writing the songs. Because there was me, and I have a lot of experience with how branching works and how to maintain a through-line of information and stuff.
Because these are Broadway-style songs, in that it's important that you listen because there's a story to each one. There's an alternate universe where you could do one where it's just about the music and the tune and you could dance to it and the content of the song is less meaningful, but here the player has to listen to the story because there's ultimately a decision to be made. So there's my contribution, which is the branching, and then the was the lyricists in the actual writing of the lyrics and creating the basis for the song. And then there was Austin with like, "This is how we want to approach this musically." And somehow the three of us had to come together.
Honestly, I think it was a lot of stop and go. It wasn't until we worked on the very last song, the finale, where we kind of figured it out like what is the pipeline? What is the best process for this? Which was amazing, because we got there. It turned out it was just that we had to sit on these very long calls with the three of us online and just hash it out together. After we did that, we were like, "Oh, we should have done this from the start." We almost need a sequel now, because we've learned so much it'd be neat to put it into practice with something right from the get go.
Since the game came out, what have been your favorite moments to see players react to in the game?
David Gaider: Quite a few. The reactions have been great. It's a great thing for a developer when you finally get a game out there and people are reacting positively; it kind of refills the soul meter. I know you've played it, I don't know about talking spoilers, but - Freddie's death and possible resurrection. There are people that did not realize you could bring her back to life, because if you don't immediately go like, "No, you can't go," you have to make that sort of objection in order to get the decision. Otherwise the song just goes right into a sad goodbye.
The Aphrodite plot with the ritual. A lot of discussion, there's been some think pieces, a few articles that have been written about people talking about the moral decisions and how they made them feel or going in depth on the mythological side and our sort of take on certain characters like Persephone. I really enjoy reading those, of course, because this is the world of Stray Gods; it's all my creation.
I already was a person who really liked mythologies, so seeing a sort of speculative "where are they now" type things was perfect.
David Gaider: There's so many people I read online that are like, "It's weird - I love musicals, and I really love mythology specifically, and it feels like this game has been made just for me." Well, you're not as alone in that as you think you are.
Do you have a favorite song in the game?
David Gaider: That's a tough question. We've sat with them for so long and they're earworms. Imagine the team working on this for four years, and we reached the point where someone in their office can just sort of sing a lyric and suddenly the rest of the team will just in. I love them all for different reasons. I think my personal favorite is probably the Hecate and Minotaur love song, just because it's kind of the most Disney-esque of the group.
Tomorrow I could turn around and be like, "No, no, I love the Persephone throne song, the sort of the duel with Orpheus." I still laugh every time we get to that moment where Mary Elizabeth did such a great take on that "Or-phe-us," and then, "hey, what happened to the music?!" because it shuts down. [Laughs] Then the Aphrodite song, the ritual, it kills me. If you take the green path, there's this one part where Eros sings, and Abubakar Salim did this soulful thing, and he gets to the line where he sings, "Every time you go you leave us a broken home." I immediately tear up.
You touched on this in of talking about working with Austin Wintory, but I'm curious about the biggest sort of challenges in of making this that you overcame in the process. Are there any specific scenes that were particularly hard to get right or anything like that?
David Gaider: We had to work on the Apollo song a lot. The very first time you meet him in the apartment, that was one of the early ones, and we weren't getting the tone right. And that was the first one that didn't have - Apollo is going to help you no matter what, so there wasn't a decision to be made per se. We were really struggling with that, we would vacillate between, "Should this be a song? So we have a song here? If it's not a real decision, do we need a song?"
A lot of it was on the creative side, like with Aphrodite's ritual, we were worried like, "Is this too dark? Is this too serious for the game?" I think the Medusa song also presented challenges because Medusa first appears in it, we didn't have a dialogue beforehand where you meet her, talk to her. We're introducing this character in the song, that was also very different. So a lot of times, it was just from a creative standpoint, we would try things and they wouldn't quite work, and we would kind of go back and forth on them a lot. The fact that we somehow got through it during COVID - the four years of so much trial and error makes me think, "Wow, I don't know how we managed that." But we did.
I know this project has been in the works since I think you said 2019.
David Gaider: Yeah, 2019. Well, I guess it started in 2018. Because we had the crowdfunding campaign in 2019, but that was in October, maybe it was early 2019. But we had to do a lot of work to just to get the crowdfunding thing together and put together the video and figure out what we were making. Late 2018 I think is when Liam [Esler] and I first sat down, and we initially were going to talk like, "Should we form a studio together?" And within that conversation, we went right to: "What kind of game will this be?" And I of course immediately jumped on, "What about a musical?"
After so many years, I would love to hear how it feels to finally have it out there.
David Gaider: It's a lot of mixed emotions. Obviously I'm glad that it's out there, and I'm glad that the people who are open to the idea, they all love it. And that seems to be what it takes. There are people that let's say reviewed it, who this is not the kind of game that would have been for them anyway. So the only reason they played it is because that's their job, and you had some mixed reviews on that side.
There also were people that really were hyperfocused on: it's a musical. And so they judged it like a stage musical. I shouldn't be surprised that their reactions were like, "Well, this doesn't really meet the standards of a musical." It's like going to a game with a heavy story and judging it as if it were a book or a movie. The fact that you've introduced interactivity and agency changes the fundamental of a narrative. And we're used to that being the case, that games have a different kind of narrative.
But I mean, that hasn't prevented the talk of, "Games have bad stories." You experience them in a different way. With this, what we discovered as we were making, because we had that same conversation where we're like, "Musicals do X, Y, and Z," and I'm like, "Well, we can't do it quite the same way." The fundamental rules change as soon as you introduce that interactivity and the player experiences it in a completely different way. But this is the first time it's been done, so we're not accustomed to thinking of it like that. But again, the people who clicked with what was happening here, they all were over the moon and have been, and that's been very gratifying.
Yeah, like you said, for some people it just wasn't really in their wheelhouse for whatever reason.
David Gaider: Yeah, and we knew that would be the case going in. Not everybody's into musicals, and some people were very anti-musical. Some people have expectations for - well, this isn't an RPG, per se, but that's a big conversation, because RPGs cover such a broad variety. And maybe for lot of people it falls way more into the realm of visual novels, and I can see that. A lot of visual novels are very text heavy, but again, like RPG, it's a broad category. Some people are maybe not going to click with where it's part of one and part of another, the particular mix - like, "Oh, there's too much talking."
There's so many things that we knew were going to be a very new thing for a lot of people. But I think that's where indie games have their greatest strength, is that you're not really aiming for mass appeal. Sure, it'd be great if you put out an indie game and it's one of those cases where it just clicks with the mass market and sells a billion zillion copies. But indie games have the potential to explore a niche, where it's of intense interest to a specific category of people. And in this case, we were kind of hoping that it's also sort of a gateway game for people who maybe don't think of themselves as gamers necessarily. We've had an older audience that maybe has watched somebody play it or heard about it and thought, "Oh, you just make choices? Yeah, I guess I could do that." And I've seen a few of those, which is very gratifying as well.
And I have to ask, are there any plans to follow up on Grace's story with DLC or anything like that?
David Gaider: I don't know. I think a lot of that is going to be up to the publisher. I know that there's also a sense on the team that's like, "Okay, this is done." People are saying, "Oh, you're gonna do a sequel, right?" It's just hard to think about right now, because it was such a long, arduous journey to get this one thing done. And I hate to say it, because I know people are just getting introduced to the songs and loving them, but we're kind of sick of the songs a little bit. I think that's okay to say if you've been on the team and living with them for years, right?
I mean, we love them, but we also hate them. We want a little bit of distance, and then maybe think about like, "Would we do that, would we do something a little bit different?" I know every time I talk to Austin about this, we talk about how it'd be a shame to have acquired all this skill and this knowledge about how to make this kind of game now, and what we would change - there's so many. There's a long list; we had our post-mortem going over what we'd do differently, and it's so long that it'd be a waste to not develop this further. But I'm also okay with the idea that if this is a new genre and people are interested, maybe now if they start working they'll be able to look at our game and say, "I like this, I hate this." And they'll do something equally interesting.
Source: Summerfall Studios/YouTube
Stray Gods is available now for PlayStation consoles, Xbox consoles, Nintendo Switch, and PC via Steam.
