Stray Children

I really really wanted to like this game because I'm a huge fan of Moon Remix RPG (to which it's a sequel) and Chulip. Unfortunately, it's just not good. Part of what made Moon and Chulip so charming is that they subverted violent video game tropes; in Moon, you show up [b]after[/b] the "hero" has killed all the monsters, and the core gameplay is about helping monsters' ghosts find their bodies so they can be put to rest. In Chulip, rather than a dedicated attack button, you have a dedicated [b]kiss[/b] button, and your goal is to figure out how to kiss everyone in town, so you become confident enough to kiss the girl of your dreams. In both games you wander freely around a big map, gradually unlocking new areas and revisiting areas to do new things. Despite having a similar visual style to these previous games, Stray Children's gameplay is a huge step back. Rather than exploring the world, it's entirely linear; you follow a path through an area, beat the area's boss, and never see that area again. And just like a typical RPG, you collect weapons and armor, and kill monsters to level up. The combat clumsily apes Undertale's "dialog combat" system: on the enemy's turn, you have to play a little bullet-hell game of dodging attacks, and on your turn you can either attack the enemy or try to talk them out of fighting. But Undertale's combat dialog was clever, and made sense, and often interwove with the bullet-hell attack dodging in neat ways. Stray Children's combat dialog just presents you with a mish-mash of words, with no context or indication of which are the right ones to say. There's no puzzle here; it's just trial and error until you happen upon the right combination of nonsensical words. You can find "shells" of monsters around the map, which tell you things about the monsters, but these things are rarely relevant to the combat dialog. When you kill a non-boss enemy, you get the usual gold and XP, and continue to see that same enemy in random encounters. But when you successfully talk to an enemy, you never see them again. This would be fine, but boss fights expect you to have killed a [b]lot[/b] of enemies to be levelled up high enough to withstand the boss's attacks, and to deal any damage to the boss. So if you've talked to all the enemies in an area, and you run into an unfair boss fight, there's no enemies to grind on to get stronger. And even when there are, the boss fights are usually far away from the areas with enemies, so you'll have a lot of backtracking to do if you want to get there. I stopped playing when I got to a clown boss who kills me in 2 hits with several different very hard bullet-hell patterns (which can hit multiple times on the same turn), whereas I would have to attack him every turn for 10 turns to defeat him (and the only way to heal is to do that instead of attacking when it's your turn). And none of the dialog options worked, so I looked it up online; apparently you can only get the necessary dialog if you've found a "dirty helmet" elsewhere on the map, with zero indication anywhere that what you need is a "dirty helmet", where you can find the "dirty helmet", or even that there [b]is[/b] a "dirty helmet". What a disappointment.

Stray Children is a very weird game, but in a way that to me feels very deliberate. Engaging with Stray Children feels not unlike engaging with a piece of abstract or surrealist art to me; it will deny you clear, concrete answers, but what you take away from it will be a function of what you bring to it. There are a few reviews here where other users have expressed frustration with the ways that this game can feel obtuse and arbitrary, which I think is fair, but I also think that its opaqueness is ultimately in service of the game's themes. To me Stray Children is about the gap in understanding between children and adults. You play as a child who's trying to figure out what happened to their missing dad, and on your journey you will meet many child characters that are subject to the whims of adults whose motives they can't understand. It's true that the peaceful route involves a lot of puzzles that feel more like guess and check than like they have any sort of logical solution, and you can even lock yourself out of solving them by missing completely arbitrary hidden clues, but I think mechanically that captures the feeling of being a child trying to navigate the complicated feelings of adults. I would argue that this game is often trying on purpose to evoke feelings of confusion, helplessness, and frustration, and I think it succeeds at that. If I had to ding its mechanics though, I do think the choice to have the bullet hell sections be isometric rather than top down was a mistake. It can be very hard in some fights to gauge where exactly in space the bullets are relative to you, in a way that I don't think adds anything. Stray Children is a game I had to think really hard about to find any meaning in, so it feels kind of beautiful and ironic that one of the meanings I ultimately landed on was "Don't drive yourself crazy looking for meaning. There are some things you won't be able to understand, and that's okay". If you play this game you might walk away with a completely different understanding than I did of what even happened on a literal textual level. But isn't that kind of neat?

Stray Children is half Chulip, half Undertale. The writing is as quirky, interesting, and sometimes effortlessly dark as Chulip, but the combat system is lifted straight out of Undertale, and is significantly harder. [h2]Some Background[/h2] For those not in the know, back in the PlayStation 2 era, a team called Punchline Studios made two games: Chulip and Rule of Rose. Chulip and Rule of Rose are two of my most favorite games. Chulip had great, unique writing, but obtuse puzzles and no combat. Rule of Rose kept the great writing, greatly improved the puzzles, and added combat, which... sucked, frankly. I always wondered if a hypothetical third Punchline game would have perfected the formula with better combat. Stray Children is that third game (or rather, the forth game. This studio made Moon too, apparently, but I'm not talking about that game). [h2]Stray Children[/h2] The store page (rightfully) mentions Chulip and Rule of Rose as part of Stray Children's lineage, but it does not mention Undertale anywhere. At time of writing, "Bullet Hell" is not even a user-defined tag for the game. It has both "Turn based RPG" and "Action RPG" (which feel like they should be mutually exclusive, but whatever), but no Bullet Hell. This is really surprising, because you spend [b]a lot[/b] of time dodging some very irritating projectile patterns. You can either "Fight" or "Talk" to enemies, just like Undertale. Fighting deals damage until you kill the enemy, and Talking allows you to branch a dialogue to end the fight in a pacifist way. Either way, after every action you take, the enemy will attack you in a bullet hell sequence (unless they decide to do nothing, which becomes less common the further in the game you get). My friends have been brow beating me for a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ decade for playing Undertale with the attitude of "I'll try the pacifist option, but if you aggravate me I'll stop playing nice", so I tried to talk my way through all the fights. This worked out (at first), because it felt a lot like solving the kissing puzzles in Chulip. Some of them are aggravatingly cryptic and feel like trial and error. Others feel more reasonable and rewarding. All of them are a test of patience, because you're always sitting through annoying bullet hell segments. The problem is a pacifist play style will leave you under-leveled. If you successfully spare an enemy, you get exp, but they're gone for good. If you kill an enemy, you still get exp, but you can run into and fight them again for more exp. [b]The game never tells you this[/b], while simultaneously clearly being balanced around you killing things more often. I hit my breaking point with the frog boss. I got to him at level 10, with 82 HP, taking around 20 damage per hit. There are bullet patterns in there I'm convinced you just need to get lucky to dodge. Questionable hitboxes aside, there are patterns where enemies move in straight lines, circles, and radiate outward in a weird spiral pattern, all while you're balancing on lily pads that move in their own circle, surrounded by water that hurts you if you fall in. I've gone from full health to dead in about 10 seconds more than once on that one. I feel like AVGN freaking out at the Medusa heads in Castlevania. The kicker? This game has no save slots, so I can't go back and grind enemies. Even if I wasn't locked in the boss area, I already spared all the enemies, so I have no exp left to gain. I'm just stuck here. Yes, I'm sure if I bang my head against this long enough, I'll eventually power through the fight. I've gotten very close several times now, but of course the patterns get more complex the lower the boss' health is. But that's the thing, I don't want to. I realized I was just tolerating this game's combat system so I could experience its writing. I love its writing. I was grinning ear to ear when I first heard the characters talking with those same goofy grunts from Chulip. I see the same brilliance of Chulip shining through nearly all the time. But the combat is such a drag that its killing the whole experience. Had I known the core mechanic of this game was bullet hell combat, I would have saved myself the aggravation and just watched the story on YouTube or something. This sucks. I was so excited to play a third Punchline game. That's literally a dream come true for me. I don't want to put a red mark on it, but god help me I'd be lying if I said I'd recommend this game. Add an accessibility option for lower damage (or rebalance the game for full-pacifist), and this instantly becomes a thumbs up. (As an aside, if you want something that feels like the spiritual successor to Rule of Rose, try Signalis)

I hate the gameplay. The bullet hell parts. The rest of the game is guessing the right password combination like the boardgame (?) Mastermind, only instead of being told how many things you got wrong or whether you them right but in the wrong order, a big loud angry buzzer plays and you are forced to play the game. The bullet hell parts. So you just keep brute forcing it by saying the same things in different orders trying to find the exact sequence that lets you out and instead of this you just die to the bullet hell stages and then go look it up and now i'm just directly following a guide because even if you do everything 100% perfectly you still have to play the hardest bullet hell stages eventually. I mean succeeding gets you punished with another bullet hell. I guess I just hate this gameplay loop. And even if I was just walking around and exploring I don't really enjoy that either. MOON was a good game, I enjoyed MOON. My sister enjoyed Chulip. I don't know. Seems like a love letter to undertale but undertale's bullet hells were cute. The guide I was following made me think I was almost done but instead of that it turns out that they also gave up at the same point. I'm not your dad. I'm not making this decision for you. But this is a weird game and I can't recommend it, sadly.

The story in Stray Children is as deep as any ever told by humanity. I do not say that lightly. If you can make it past the tonal whiplash of cutesy humor alongside nearly-unfathomable cruelty and capricious disposal of characters' lives, this goes to the absolute bottom of the well of archetypes. To ask, 'What kind of a world would have such uncaring cruelty in it? And who is ultimately responsible?' The answer the game gives is something I don't know that I've seen expressed anywhere else. (Plus, the story is accompanied by some of the most gorgeous visuals- and jaw-droppingly naturalistic lighting- I've ever seen in this genre/artstyle.) The gameplay in Stray Children seems almost designed to make you never want to get far enough to experience the story. I can stand difficulty. But I don't like puzzles that are only possible to solve via brute force trial-and-error, or metaknowledge. There are dozens of bosses in this game. Most of them require tedious repetition to unlock the desired outcome, and the hints are often vague enough to be as likely to mislead as to lead. In a game about empathy, it is not possible to solve most of these puzzles with empathy, because there is not enough character depth or consistency made available to the player for them to empathize WITH. We learn more about the characters at the very end, which gives context to what was experienced in battling them. But it does not work to present a puzzle, and only give the necessary clues to solve it AFTER the solution. Frankly, this game brought back awful memories of being a child, and having to deal with selfish, neurotic adults expecting me to magically know how to relate to them, or fix them, or be their therapist. The game itself is almost certainly doing this on purpose, to call attention to how nightmarishly confusing and unfair childhood can be sometimes. But, if you are telling a story about trauma, and your method is to deliberately CAUSE IT in your audience, that's not what entertainment is for. From one writer to another, I know that, if I had ever released anything like this, it could only be out of spite and punishment. That's Not What Entertainment Is For. There is literally no reason to pay money to play this. Watch a walkthrough, I beg you. This is a story that is absolutely, 100% worth experiencing. But the method in which it is told should not be rewarded.

This game is unapologetically inscrutable sometimes despite being so linear, but it's just so damn charming you can't help but love it. Unrelated, but it'd be awesome if Onion Games brought Chulip to steam as well.

I only recommend this game if you are already a fan of Lovedelic games, especially Onion/Punchline(+LKS), and you absolutely must play Moon before this. That being said, this game delivered on everything I ever wanted, it surprised me immensely with very deep cut references and a very strong, emotional plot. The gameplay can be very frustrating, but I liked that about it at times. It gets incredibly tedious with very cryptic hints I only understood after I brute forced them. But even despite that, it is a work of art. This game is an absolute labor of love, and I am so thankful it exists, I will treasure this game forever.

As a fan of moon after I randomly happened to pick it up on the switch, I was very excited to see Onion games release an entry that was supposed to feel like a spiritual successor of that one. And the world, the characters, the feeling, the storytelling, the music... everything is just great. But then you get to the actual gameplay segments in this and they feel absolutely terrible and repetetive. Like nobody likes dodging the same 2 attack patterns over and over and over and over and over... until you smehow figure out what words to say in what order to the enemy. And speaking of. While there might be hints towards what to say to them. It is still VERY CRYPTIC. I dont know why but some of the hints just didn't make any sense to me, even after figuring it out through trial and error. Either it is lost in translation or I am actually just too stupid to make sense of it. And exactly this trial and error behaviour is what makes the combat in this game SUCH A SLOG. In addition to that, there are so many very specific things to get through very obscure conditions. Which in this kinda game I don't really mind. WHAT I MIND THOUGH IS THAT THEY ARE MISSABLE PERMANENTLY. Like I progressed too fast in the snow area and missed one of the pieces needed for the true ending. And the game just wouldnt let me go back. Gone forever. Same thing happened in the Mirror worls. I exited too fast, saved the game and I just couldnt get the item to pacify the area boss anymore. GONE GONE GONE. I don't even mind the conditiions being weird or obscure or that you might even have to get a guzide to know about them, but that they are permanently missable and REQUIRE basically a second playthrough to get the true ending? I don't know about that. This together with the combat just killed my motivation altogether and I will have to force myself to even finish one playthrough. I rather just replay moon again.

I couldn't bring myself to finish it. The writing is a charming as ever, as par the course for Onion Games, but the actual gameplay is incredibly frustrating. There is a mercy mechanic during fights that requires picking the correct order of dialogue options, and in between each there are bullet hell segments. Experimenting is punished. One mistake will send you all the way back to the beginning of the sequence, and you will need to pick all the correct dialogue and go through a bullet hell for each option [b]again[/b]. Fights end up [i]so[/i] tedious, and some of the RNG is completely unfair; you move very slowly and some attacks are impossible to dodge, especially if you haven't gotten the chance to purchase certain items. I absolutely adored moon, but this is on another level of asking the player to decipher clues from the most obscure, vague hints ever. Sometimes you're better off just guessing and brute forcing it.

More Moon than Undertale, more Undertale than Moon in gameplay. Accept that you won't complete it 100% unless you use a guide, and then commit to either using that guide or ignoring it. A good game with great music, atmosphere, and concepts. I would say it has a great story but I'm honestly not sure what the overall message is - this is an amalgamation of wonderful ideas that I don't think come together at the end. Worth the time, worth the money. Now please release Chulip again.