Growing up means understanding the faults and flaws that grown ups exhibited wasn’t always a matter of being mean, dumb, or a combination of the two. Sometimes, adults just try their best, and it’s not very good, even by the standards of a child.  But, conversely, sometimes mature, fully-formed people make baffling, criminal decisions that even a three year old can call out, and that’s just the awful truth of it all. Stray Children, the newest piece of art from Onion Games, is a complex, baffling and, at times, incredibly painful tour-de-force that explores multiple concepts of what it means to be in a world where adults fail just as often, if not moreso, than children, and what that means to those affected. It’s never clear, but it’s always engaging, and it stands as Onion Games’ greatest work to date.

That’s a weird way to justify denying my insurance claim but okay.

You, the protagonist, are a dog child who awakens to a potentially typical scene. Your mother is nowhere to be found, presumably at work. She’s left a note to get some food that she’s prepared, yet, no matter how you search, no food is found. Your evening disappointment is quickly interrupted by the appearance of a man at your front door, claiming to be your uncle, and wanting to tell you something about your father, who disappeared years ago. Very quickly, you’re sucked into a lost video game that was your father’s final work, and where your “uncle” believes your father still resides. For reasons that cannot possibly be explained, you help “beat” the game, resulting in the whole thing beginning to disintegrate. With no way out, you get sucked into an unknown void, potentially erasing your character from existence. Then…things get weird.

So glad this is the adult I’m relying on right now.

Stray Children is as bizarre a game as you can fathom, and, oftentimes, you cannot. The protagonist (whom I ironically named Tragedy) traverses from world to world within this game with a game, trying to find any way out, even if it’s through. Each land you encounter has two things in abundance: children with different forms of abusive lives and the looming presence of Olders, which are adults that have been transformed into monsters. Your character will do their best to communicate with the denizens of each realm and figure out what, if anything, can be done to move forward. Usually, you need to figure out how to reach the parental figure of each world, who are themselves incredibly strong and scary Olders, and defeating them will lead to the next realm. If you really boil it down, it’s a classic RPG setup: defeat the rulers to progress.

Yet the concept is never as simple as you’d imagine. For one, everything you encounter in Stray Children is odd, sometimes to a point of complete shock. Your armor is different kinds of boxer shorts, but your accessory slot gets filled with rings of different boons. Weapons start with shovels and get bigger, branching out into manhole covers or giant fish. You’ll find plenty to eat and drink to heal HP or stave off status ailments, but you can only get them from happenstance (finding them in chests) or purchasing them from Other merchants who may luckily pop up in the same aggressive areas where the antagonistic Others will appear. While you get XP from victories in battles, it’s never enough to think of a fight as a simple exchange of blows. While that could be possible, that approach disregards the way that Onion Games has evolved over the years.

Wow, an attack on the character I can really relate to.

You can draw a straight line from the classic JRPG Moon to Undertale, as Toby Fox has been unabashed in citing its influence. Moon was created by Onion Games back under another moniker (LOVE•de•LIC), and the concept of a game where you could win without actually fighting became so endearing to a select few that it inspired one of the biggest indie titles of the last twenty years, if not one of the bigger ones of all time. Of course, Undertale took this concept and elevated it with incorporation of the dodging system where players needed to undergo some danmaku gymnastics to survive even if you weren’t planning to attack. This, in turn, has lead to a secondary inspiration that builds Stray Children’s combat system, so it’s interesting to see artists play off each other in such a respectful way without completely aping the other’s ideas.

For Stray Children, combat is a complex affair that involves quick time events, lightning reflexes and critical thinking, along with reading comprehension. If you choose to go the aggro route, you’ll find that you can level up exceedingly quickly within the game. The Olders will continue to spawn if you merely defeat them through combat, and you can get into a good groove on timing your swings along with dodging around attack patterns that unfurl. The attacks from the enemies are a fantastic mixed bag, with all kinds of clues and cues as to how to survive the onslaught. I had a particularly difficult time understanding the boss of the third realm until I realized the card patterns that needed to be followed, and, after that, my dodging became more succinct. 

Thankfully, I spent a lot of time with NES games, so this wasn’t as bad as it could have been.

But the real joy comes from discovering the passive ways to defuse combat, which involves conversations and discovery. Stray Children peppers the landscape with broken effigies of the Olders, clear nods to the fact that they are broken people from a previous life, and you can glean clues and hints about them from their statues. Some Olders miss the days of polite conversation, so being able to figure out the right conversational branches to make them feel heard is the way forward. Some want you to repeat back a coded phrase they’ve hidden in their biographies, perhaps strewn amongst a seeming word salad of exposition. And others will tell you outright what they want to hear, you just need to know how to repeat it back to them. Whether you’re listing delicious fruits or calling someone a fraud, the right words open their hearts and lead towards salvation.

Figuring out these conversational points can be trial and error in the most egregious way, so it’s quite lucky the Olders let you know, in a most violent fashion, when you’ve hit the wrong note. This can get difficult at times, because you then need to start the chain of words over again, and you’ll have to dodge and stay alive in spite of your attempts at parlay. The difficulty curve here can be quite extreme: for example, a couple of enemies ask you to repeat yourself, saying the same phrase multiple times, which feels counterintuitive to how you’d normally approach conversation. When you mess up, you need to do some combat dodging, and, if you get hit, your pacifist approach leaves you with pretty low HP overall. So now you need to burn an extra turn eating a consumable to stay alive, unless you want to gamble on your health.

This game over is trying to be chipper. I appreciate that.

The world of Stray Children is one that paints a melancholy picture of what was happening in the mind’s eye of the protagonist’s father, and it reflects sentiments and expressions that are shared universally. Though the messages can be delivered in convoluted fashions, the concepts of how we lose our childhood – through grinding exhaustion, through escaping into sleep and ennui, through attaining perfection at any price – are reflections of the life and livelihood that people suffer and persevere through every day. There is a dark relatability that each and every world promises some form of “Happiness” that the children NPCs want to reach, and the Happiness is often a macabre idea of release. While the game is never grotesque or bloody, the subject matter – ranging from neglect to abuse to euthanasia – can catch you wildly off guard.

Rather than being a matter of stark contrast, the grim undertones are paired fantastically with the offbeat humor and gags that are peppered throughout the game. Your “uncle” is immediately transformed into a dog, and seems to pay no attention to this matter during the duration of the game. The items you find have ridiculous descriptions and details that can get a chuckle out of you when you least expect it, including finding actual poop. References to Super Sentai, Clint Eastwood films, Uber Eats and everything else under the sun. The fact that children are actually pretty pissed when you destroy the person that’s been enslaving them (alright, that’s more trauma than funny, but the reactions are incredible). There’s a world of sleep where you have to transition between areas by eating magic mushrooms, and it gets really weird. It’s fabulous, but it’s so weird.

Quick, roll to see if I’m getting drunk!

And that’s just it. Stray Children is an art game that does the impossible task of trying to be everything at once and mostly succeeds. It’s an RPG with arcade action that’s a puzzle game with a life simulator on top of a collect-a-thon with a dash of walking sim. Over the course of the game, you’ll be treated to a smorgasbord of music that touches on every kind of tone imaginable, some of it sad and sweeping, some of it tight and poppy, all of it trying to match an increasingly wild landscape that, once again, shouldn’t be here, and yet it is. The colors, the designs, the characters, the noise…it’s so much all the time, but it never gets overwhelming.

As an aside, I truly love the way that Onion Games has handled voices within the game. Rather than hire professional actors to flush out the sounds of every character (and everyone talks), they had an open call for fans to submit their voices by reading a script in any style they want. Onion Games then took those voices, remixed them in their own special way, and layered them in throughout the game. English, Japanese, French, Spanish…everyone who loved Moon and wanted to be a part of this spiritual sequel sent in audio, and now fans throughout the world can eagerly play and try and find their own words peppered within a fantastic experience. It all sounds wonderfully garbled, but it adds to the dreamy, almost confusing aspect of the game overall.

Yes, for like the past six hours.

The only, only problem I have with Stray Children is that it can be so obfuscated that it bites the player on the bottom. Some of the fights require you to have items that you find throughout the game in order to unlock the appropriate dialogue branches that let you release the Olders. For example, your first boss fight won’t allow you to win through talking unless you find a photograph outside of the main arena. This seems reasonable enough, though it’s a test for players to really dig in on exploration in order to make the most out of the game. This is slightly hampered by the fact that your inventory is, in fact, limited, and you almost always want to have a Dash Donut on hand (edible item that lets you run faster in a single fight).

But I wanted a 100% clear on the game through no fighting, and there were a couple of enemies that it was impossible. There’s a mob you encounter about 60% through the game that, if you don’t have an otherwise worthless item that you find at the very beginning, you’re screwed. If the item is in storage and you forgot to bring it in, you’re done. You’ve screwed up and you can’t do anything to get it back. Stray Children inexplicably has only one save slot, so you need to simply hope for the best and power through even if you make a mistake. In this way, the game further reflects life and how a single choice changes the trajectory of everything you’d planned, but, at the same time, this is a game and I want to cheap out and save scum my way to happiness.

I identify with this bird so hard.

Having said that, Stray Children is everything I had hoped it would be and more. As much as I love Moon, it has a certain vintage feel to it that doesn’t quite engage as well as modern games do. Stray Children scratches this itch by having incredible writing and effortless oddness coupled with strong combat and a boatload of variety in how to survive. The tale it weaves is one that’s so familiar you can hear it slamming the door shut as it goes to pick up a pack of cigarettes for the last time. It’s got longing and abandonment woven together with humor, hope and plenty of memorable madness. This is Onion Games’ opus, and I hope they’re proud of what they’ve accomplished. On nights of sonder and existential loneliness, remember that we have all been, at one time or another, stray children. I hope it comforts you.

Stray Children is available now on Nintendo Switch and PC.

Reviewed on Nintendo Switch.

A copy of Stray Children was provided by the publisher.