trying so hard to not be mean and hateful but man Stray Gods just feels like such a failure of an overall concept to me
I haven't played it myself, but I've been watching a friend play, and like... I like the art style, and I like the setting and conceit of the game, but... the core concept feels entirely at odds with the whole experience.
Musical visual novel? Sounds great-- and it's a lot more visual than most other VNs are. BUT the motion comic style doesn't pair particularly well with the musical numbers, which lack showstopping visuals.
And the musical numbers don't feel quite right. For starters, the story never progresses through the musical numbers but rather through dialogue segments before and after the musical numbers. Musical numbers are inconsistent in quality and within each song itself, and the music has a bunch of variants to choose between stanzas (I hesitate to say "chorus" because the songs I have witnessed do not fall back to a common melody a lot of the time) which CAN influence character reactions post-song. BUT these variants come at the cost of the musical numbers never finding a real home in my heart or mind. There's good PARTS of songs but each part of a song basically feels like a different song entirely. There's duets where characters sing different lines with one another and the lyrics and melodies don't... add up or work out to be one good, coherent song.
Plus, it being a murder mystery makes the choose-your-own-adventure style approach feel a bit like a waste, since it doesn't change the outcome, but it does change how characters interact with you, so it's not a total loss.
I like the characters well enough, though something about the game feels a bit like a slightly disingenuous attempt to signal to the players "hey we're inclusive i promise!" but that could just be me being a hater.
I do really like the idea of the game. I just think they fumbled the execution. If it was a plain VN with musical numbers that don't change every few lines (and thus have less variety to waste songwriting time on), I think I'd like it a lot more. But it's marketed on its musical nature ("Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical") and that makes its musical failings impossible for me to overlook.