Stray Children Review

A spiritual successor caught between beauty and frustration

Stray Children is a surreal fairy-tale adventure from Onion Games, the studio behind cult classics Moon: Remix RPG Adventure, Chulip, and Rule of Rose, arriving as an unofficial but clearly intentioned spiritual successor to Moon nearly three decades after that game's original release. Its premise -- children navigating a world where the adults around them have suddenly turned hostile -- sets up a bittersweet exploration of the gap between childhood and adulthood, delivered through Onion Games' distinctively strange, Love-de-Lic-inflected storytelling. The game released on 30 October 2025 at a premium NZ$43.59, and its review sample, 182 reviews at the time of writing, sits at Mostly Positive -- a score that reflects genuine, often rapturous praise for the game's presentation running directly into serious, detailed frustration with how it plays.

Presentation draws the most consistent and enthusiastic praise in the entire sample, without real dissent. One reviewer calls the game "probably the most gorgeous art ever put in a game," pairing that praise with "splendid sound design and writing," while another simply states this is "the best game I've played in years" after just seven hours. A longtime fan of the developer's catalogue writes that engaging with Stray Children "feels not unlike engaging with a piece of abstract or surrealist art," warning it will deny players clear answers but reward whatever they bring to it. Reviewers steeped in Onion Games' earlier work -- Moon, Chulip, and the broader Love-de-Lic lineage the studio descends from -- consistently describe the writing and atmosphere as a genuine continuation of that catalogue's charm, distinctive darkness, and emotional weight, with several explicitly calling the game's themes about parenthood and the loss of childhood wonder deeply affecting once they come into focus.

Where the sample turns sharply divided is combat, and the criticism here is detailed rather than vague. Multiple reviewers explicitly frame the fighting system -- built around bullet-hell dodging segments interspersed with dialogue-order puzzles used to "purify" hostile adults rather than kill them -- as lifted wholesale from Undertale, and several argue that transplant sits uneasily against the anti-violence philosophy that made the studio's earlier games distinctive. One reviewer, a longtime fan who says they learned Japanese partly to play the developer's earlier untranslated work, writes that the game is "great when it's great, and just outright unfun when it isn't." Another describes changing their review from Recommended to Not Recommended specifically because of gameplay issues, despite loving "the Love-de-Lic atmosphere and writing we love." A third reviewer calls the mercy-dialogue puzzles frustrating specifically because "experimenting is punished," with one mistake in a bullet-hell segment forcing a full restart of an encounter's dialogue tree.

That frustration compounds for several reviewers into a broader critique of the game's structure. More than one reviewer flags missable items and irreversible points of no return within an otherwise strictly linear world, arguing this undercuts the free-roaming, low-stakes exploration that made Moon feel distinctive decades ago. Basic information about how to approach fights -- checking enemy "shells" for hints, or finding clues scattered through the environment -- is frequently described as underexplained or hidden behind optional NPC dialogue that isn't clearly signposted, leaving several reviewers feeling punished for engaging with combat the way the tutorial seemed to invite. One especially detailed critical review states plainly that the fights with the game's hostile "Olders" are "tedious, inscrutable, and so very, very long," while still praising the visuals, sound, and world in the same breath -- a split verdict that recurs across a striking number of the sample's most thoughtful negative reviews.

It's worth noting this isn't a universal reaction. A meaningful share of the positive sample explicitly engaged with and enjoyed the same combat system others rejected, with one reviewer specifically advising newcomers not to fight every enemy immediately and to instead lean into the game's intended pace of searching for clues before engaging -- suggesting the friction reported by critical reviewers may partly reflect players expecting a more traditional RPG combat loop than the game is built to deliver. Still, the sheer number of detailed, sympathetic reviewers -- self-identified fans of the developer's entire catalogue -- who ultimately couldn't get past the fighting suggests this isn't simply a case of the wrong audience finding the game; it's a genuine design friction between the game's storytelling ambitions and its mechanical execution.

Value framing is where the sample's reservations land most concretely. At NZ$43.59 for a linear, single-playthrough experience, several reviewers explicitly weigh the asking price against how much of that runtime is spent fighting through a system they found actively detracted from the story they came for. The developer's visible post-launch support, including update notices addressing player feedback into 2026, suggests some of these frustrations are being taken seriously, but as of this review the core combat friction described across the sample remains the central obstacle standing between Stray Children and the kind of unreserved acclaim its presentation alone would otherwise command.

Verdict

Stray Children is a genuine artistic achievement -- its art direction, music, and distinctively strange writing earn some of the most enthusiastic individual praise in this lane, and its thematic ambitions around childhood and parenthood land powerfully for reviewers willing to meet it halfway. But its Undertale-indebted combat system draws detailed, repeated frustration even from devoted fans of the developer's earlier work, and a linear structure with missable content and underexplained systems compounds that friction into a genuine barrier for a meaningful share of players. This is a must-play for existing fans of Moon: Remix RPG Adventure and similarly cryptic anti-RPGs willing to push through real mechanical frustration -- everyone else should go in with tempered expectations about how the game plays, not just how it looks.