Stray Children

Developer/publisher Onion Games Format PC (tested), Switch Release Out now

F or the past decade, Onion Games’ output has been bite-sized, expressed in quickfire arcadey puzzlers and shooters and through the constraints of Dandy Dungeon’s five-by-five grids. In comparison, Stray Children is a giant, a return to the full-length RPGs that Yoshiro Kimura made at the start of his career. In harking back to cult PS1 game Moon, which he and other Onion Games staffers, including character designer Kurashima Kazuyuki and composer Hirofumi Taniguchi, originally worked on (and released worldwide in 2020), it also gives the impression of a swan song – Kimura’s final fantasy, if you will.

It begins with a child – with the face of a dog, a sort of Snoopy in a hoodie – being sucked into a videogame. However, this world, Crescent Moon, is on the verge of disappearing, its in-game clock no longer working, and its resident heroic knight set to be broken into pieces. It’s a self-aware premise, yet if Moon was an ‘anti-RPG’ that parodied genre tropes, then Stray Children practically subverts its subversions back to a more traditional structure. After awakening from apparent oblivion, our dog-child wanders from town to town on a mission to put the hero back together, while engaging in turn-based battles in which victory awards experience that levels up your stats. Of course, traditional is relative, and the approach here remains idiosyncratic, in no small part thanks to a cast of oddballs, realised with Kazuyuki’s charming sprite work and characterful gibberish audio.