Onion Games have released the English language version of Stray Children, a “bittersweet, fairytale RPG” I hadn’t heard of till Oisin wrote it up in June, and then became very excited about.
Created by Onion Games, the developers of Moon: Remix RPG Adventure, Stray Children takes place in a world of kids besieged by monstrous adults. The kids live in a stronghold, while the adults, aka Olders, roam the landscapes beyond, each “carrying the heavy load of their own inadequacies, self-doubt, and all of the grievances that grown-ups gather”.
So… not a game I will play with my nephew, then. Not until he’s 40, when I will hopefully be dead. It looks amazing, though: eerie and fizzy and a little depraved. There are treehouses and submarines and Icicle Bullets of Love. Here’s a trailer.
Watch on YouTube
As every child knows, it can be difficult to defeat grown-ups through force of arms. You may find it more effective to talk to them, surgically targeting their psychic vulnerabilities with phrases like “do you remember having hair” and “nobody remembers that thing you like”. As in Toby Fox’s Undertale, you can talk to opponents in Stray Children to trigger various responses and overcome their defences.
Also as in Undertale, the battle system is a mix of turn-based and shmuppy, with players darting out of the path of various weaponised metaphors. What do the squealing piglets stand for? I am going to say: somebody’s inability to deal with the fact that they never mastered the clarinet.
“Deftly dodge the relentless barrage of their bottled-up emotions, and discover the source of their strange stories,” encourages the Steam page. “By touching their heart with your words, you might just be able to save their souls.” The Steam blurb concludes with a moderately atypical plea from the dev. “We hope you’ll have fun discovering all the secrets of Stray Children, but we have one final request for anyone and everyone who finishes the game: please keep the ending a secret!”
While Moon: Remix RPG Adventure was a re-release of Love-de-Lic’s anti-RPG Moon from 1997 – one of the major influences on Undertale, with the caveat that Fox never actually played it beforehand – Stray Children is a new project from Onion Games director and game designer Yoshiro Kimura, whose credits include Romancing SaGa 2 and Rule of Rose.
The Tokyo-based studio’s other members include art director Kurashima Kazuyuki, who worked on Live A Live and Super Mario RPG, and composer and sound designer Hirofumi Taniguchi, who did music for Suikoden and Contra: Hard Corps. In short: pedigree.
I’d love to include some hands-on impressions, but I’ve just seen this pop up on my feed. I’ve read three launch Steam reviews, which are as follows: “Undertale but heterosexual”, “heterosexual but Undertale”, and then, an actual review from a self-described bug tester who comments that Stray Children shouldn’t be compared too avidly to either Moon or Undertale. It certainly looks like a world of its own.