Stray Children begins with your inexplicably dog-faced orphan being invited out at night by a peculiar, grinning man. You follow him through empty streets to a secret room in an underground train station, packed with elderly computing equipment. The man tells you that this used to be your father’s workplace. He warns you not to touch one of the computers, then shambles off theatrically for an indefinite toilet break. With no other option save heading home alone, you poke the forbidden console and are promptly sucked inside it.
Delivered in the context of what could, for all its Narnian absurdity, be a case of abduction, the patent false choices here deftly preface a fable about toxic power dynamics between adults and children. As the child, you are a force of novelty and change, but to begin with, at least, you must scurry along rails laid down by your elders and betters.
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Inside the console, you’re enmeshed in a sequence of gorgeous and emaciated, PS1-era fantasy worlds apparently devised by your missing dad. There are glacial prison camps dedicated to insomnia and litter disposal; clockwork flying islands strewn with smashed claymation statues; salmon-pink, Sergeant Peppery swamps; nicotine-yellow, smartphone-lit labyrinths of Pom Poko commuters. There are also other children, all of them tyrannised, manipulated or besieged by adults who have transformed into monsters such as lustful frog kings and Funko Pop vampires.
These “Olders” rework the menageries of Dragon Quest and co into sets of mutant Jungian archetypes. Their traumas literally split their skins to produce creatures that cartoonify and sanitise problems like workplace burnout, chronic debt and loneliness. Find those molted skins, and you can enter each Older into a bestiary that offers clues as to the creature’s formative dysfunction. As in Undertale, a massive influence here, you can then whisper key phrases to Olders in mostly random, turn-based battles to unclog their emotions and “save their souls”.
Or, you can smash the Older’s gibbering sprite with a spade. While pacifying every Older may seem like the right way to play – if nothing else, it removes that enemy forever from the random battle pool – swatting them all dead possibly makes for a better game, because it does more justice to Stray Children’s gimmick-rich bullet hell elements.
Your offensive options consist only of an attack power QTE, but when the Older hits back, anything might happen. The arena could become an ice block maze where Disgaea penguins pirouette towards you, farting coronas of crystals. Or a Dali clockface that winds and rewinds its payload of green fire. All of these skits are daffy reflections of the Older’s defining trauma, which may prove to be something relatively innocuous. There’s a pig in a porkpie hat, for example, whose squealing assaults embody a dislike of small talk.
Surviving the potted bullet hellscapes is less about reflexes, more about tricks such as kiting a targetting halo, with shrewd pattern recognition encouraged by the absence of a dodge or sprint. Chapter-closing boss Olders deliver bespoke minigame elements. You might have to pick from unit cards dealt by a rundown Pennywise. You might have to rip batteries from the motherboard of god.
I love how heedless developers Onion Games are of the hidebound binaries of realism and fantasy, earnestness and irony that govern many other RPGs – that need to either avoid breaking the “fourth wall” or make a point of pissing on its rubble. Even before you venture inside the game within the game, Stray Children seems comfortable with its own status as metafiction, confident that you will feel the weight of its tale even when its allusions provoke whiplash and create the impression that it is copy-pasting research tabs at whim.
The same ad lib crackpot energy informs the business of pacifying Olders, which requires you to feed them phrases in the correct order, based on your bestiary snippets and other hints. An example with no spoilers: when fighting the Slothbell, a doleful pencilneck moth, your options are “higher?”, “lower?”, “tired?”, “slower?”, “on top?” and “get to work!” Make the right choices and the creature will hum with pleasure; make all the right choices, and you can seal the deal with an “Open Sesame”, bursting the arena like a seedpod and sending the liberated monster to heaven.
Some of these verbal puzzles are cheap jokes, phoned-in newspaper riddles. A couple are borderline nonsensical in a way that makes me empathise for the English localisation team, teasing together local equivalents for Japanese puns. Some channel Shakespeare, others involve acrostics, and a few are more like reading and keeping pace with state changes in other RPGs.
While feisty of conceit, however, the word puzzles can be very frustrating. Each Older concept invites you to be playful, as much by constraining your vocabulary as by way of the individual keywords and the louche and boggling visual elements. But there is only ever one desired sequence of phrases. Speak out of turn, and the Older may throw a tantrum and hit you with a longer version of a regular attack, then oblige you to start from the beginning. This trial-and-repetition focus has the abysmal side effect of draining your enthusiasm for the accompanying bullet hell bits.
The wrist-slapping roteness of the initially colourful verbal puzzling echoes wider irritation with Stray Children’s overall linear structure. Unlike in the developer’s previous Moon: RPG Remix Adventure, you aren’t given a world to roam freely while you have the energy to keep your eyes open. Instead, you’re chewing through chapters and enclaves of NPCs with many points of no return. Wooing late-game Olders requires that you acquire certain items or insights that are squirrelled away in an alcove or optional dialogue in the opening hour. So as when pacifying individual Olders, you might need to start the whole thing over to get the ending you desire.
It seems cantakerous and arbitrary. And well, isn’t that how adults often appear to children? While I find Stray Children too annoying to complete – hence this not being a full review – I think to complain about the game’s opaque strictness of sequence is to miss how this plays out the wider story theme. I had caring parents and kind teachers as a kid, but I knew plenty of ogreish Olders – so did you, I’m sure. I remember the times when an instruction became less about instruction and more a need for control obliged by exhaustion and inability to explain certain wrinkles of the universe to a ten-year-old. Just do it that way because I said so, you little brat.
Of course, I am an Older myself now, and I’ve said things like this to kids, much as I try not to. Kids are a pain in the arse: always banging on doors without understanding what it means to open them, always saying the wrong thing at the wrong moment. I feel bouyed by their lack of inhibition but also, god, will you please stop pushing my buttons and leave me alone (running away from battles to gather intelligence in Stray Children is, incidentally, a much sounder strategy than using up patience and healing items, while you figure out a peaceful resolution).
I feel that same yearning and exasperation in the oddly clenched and miserly nature of Stray Children’s construction, for all its occasional resemblance to a series of brilliant and brilliantly mismatched bedtime storybooks, shoved into your hands by a wakeful child. This is a game designed by Olders for Olders who are both deeply aggravated by children, perhaps even afraid of them, and hoping to be saved by them.