Game of the Year 2025 >You whisper, "Undertale ripoff?", very softly. Massive Rat typed "If you try playing this game like Undertale, you'll be miserable. Miserable!" Massive Rat is in an awful mood... It's completely fuming! Then, Massive Rat posted a review!

heterosexual but undertale

This is not moon. This is not UNDERTALE. It is something else entirely. Yet, fans of both will feel right at home inside the world of Stray Children. This is one of those generational kinds of titles. It's truly a showcase of the decades of working in the video game industry that the people in this team have experienced. I believe it to be their masterwork, a game that takes everything they've learned over the years and demonstrates it with such class that you'd expect this to have come from a dev team of 50+, rather than the handful of people who worked on it. It's a beautiful experience through and through, and I highly encourage anybody to check it out and give it a try. It is an incredibly fun, thought-provoking, and deeply special title that deserves all the attention it can get. (Product was received for free as part of the bug-testing program)

Love-de-Yiik --edit-- after having a day to reflect on it, i think this hurt as bad as when i played anthology of the killer after having enjoyed thecatamites' works entered both games with immense expectation of Vibes that were not present but at least that game didn't have random encounters

undertale and moon: rpg love child's distant relative for the chronically online who prefer northernlion over jerma

I wish I didn't have to click the Yes or No button to post a review. Stray Children is great when it's great, and just outright unfun when it isn't. For context, I feel I am the player Stray Children was made for, I loved Moon, I loved Chulip, Chibi-Robo, and, hell, in my nerdiest form, I started learning Japanese just to play through Giftpia. I love the Lovedelic universe and how each of those games feel like a completely unique concept to what a video game can be. Most of them with an implicit message that it's okay to take your time and enjoy life for what it is. Stray Children misses that concept, and replaces it with a more convoluted version of Undertale's gameplay mechanic. That's okay, of course, and anyone keeping up will know that Undertale was inspired by Moon RPG, and Stray Children, being a pseudo-sequel to Moon, is directly inspired by Undertale. It's a nice cycle of inspiration that I think it's really lovely. However, what Stray Children takes from Undertale, it changes in ways to be far more difficult to deal with, in every regard. Stray Children's core game mechanic is Talking to the Olders. You save each Older by correctly Talking to them about different Subjects in the correct Order. But if you mess up at all, by choosing the wrong Subject or accidentally clicking Fight instead of Talk or something, you have to restart the entire sequence from the start. With each Older only really having 2 or 3 total attack patterns, the fights can get very draining if you get the puzzle wrong. Also, the way you're intended to solve these puzzles is by finding the Olders' Shell in the wild, when found, it'll give you a hint towards the correct sequence. This usually makes the puzzle easy to solve, but sometimes it gets a bit obtuse, especially on the boss fights. A lack of consistency on some of the Boss Fights makes them even more frustrating than they otherwise would be. When you're inputting the correct sequence usually, text will appear saying that the Olders' heart has opened a little. This isn't always the case on boss fights and you're basically just supposed to guess, multiple hours in, that you're on the right sequence. I, of course, spent over an hour on the same boss fight, inputting the first 4 Subjects correctly, and then having to try every single Subject again until I found the correct one. There's a lot of little things like that, that feel inconsistent and make what should be a relatively straight forward puzzle game a lot more annoying of a journey than I believe is intended. Could be a translation issue maybe, but I'm not sure. Precedence is a major part of puzzle games, and when a game completely abandons the concept of Precedence, it ends up feeling unfair to the player. Another example of this would be how for the first 3 areas of the game, I made sure to repeatedly talk to every NPC, only to be implicitly told by the game that every NPC has 1 set of dialogue. Then I was presented with no path forward, unless I managed to talk to a set of NPCs 3 times in a row, despite them having the same dialogue the first 2 times. Maybe part of the point, the game does a very bad job explaining what anything is or how anything works. This isn't a huge deal in a game like MOON or Chulip, where you literally have all the time in the world to figure something out, and the only punishment for missing a Catch! or a Smooch is that you have to try again in a couple of minutes. But Stray Children is a linear puzzle game, if you can't solve something immediately, you're stuck. There's no where else to go, nothing else to do, which is a common thing for puzzle games of course, but like I said, the lack of Precedence in this game makes it less enjoyable to sit and solve a singular puzzle. Puzzles in general are either extremely obvious to the point there's essentially no puzzle, or very poorly explained and it turns into a guessing game to solve. The punishment is also something equally draining, like having to walk through a series of rooms again just for another chance at guessing the answer, or having to spend 10 minutes trying the same sequence of answers repeatedly to figure out the last one. At the risk of repeating myself, the previous Lovedelic Experiences are open worlds where there's a plethora of puzzles to solve and people to talk to. Stray Children is Linear in a way that feels cyclical, like about halfway through the game, I know exactly how every area I explore is setup and it all feels... off. Where you go and talk to NPCs in Moon and Chulip to get some side quests, maybe some hints to a puzzle, and then you go off and randomly find souls to catch and residents to kiss, Stray Children is an A/B setup. Complete some sort of task for the NPCs blocking your way, enter Monster Territory where you need to Save All The Olders, and Do NOT Enter the Castle until you've saved them all! Repeat. This is where the puzzle frustration really comes into play. There's no choice or any back and forth in the forms of puzzle solving you do. It's always A and then it's always B. Moon and Chulip have plenty of esoteric and difficult to solve puzzles, but you're given other avenues to explore while you ponder them. In Moon for example, you have a few puzzles that have to be solved before you're able to continue the main story of the game, but with so many monsters to catch and love to find, it never feels like you're forced to sit down and solve that to continue playing the game. I think it's great that some form of the Lovedelic team tried to make a new game with new ideas. I just wish they had understood the bits of their older games that I and many others really loved and found the most important. The dialogue is still great, the designs of the characters and look of the areas is still fantastic. It's just the linearity of the game that really hurts it. The worst part, for me, is that you totally could interlink all of these areas in a way where the Olders all spawn in their established spots like Chulip, and allow you to progress through the game in the same way as the old games, but for some reason you're stuck in this straight line, constant point-of-no-return game, where every missed thing and every new discovery makes me go "oh, I'm really going to have to play the game again for a good ending, aren't I?". To clarify, I'm actually completely unaffected by the Points of No Return. I missed a key item in the absolute first section of the game, I've made my Peace. In fact, I believe that all of the Lovedelic games are created with the intention of being Replayed. You aren't supposed to 100% Moon or Chulip, because if you have, you'll know exactly what I mean when I say those games get increasingly less enjoyable to play the less options you have available. When you only need to find one more Soul to catch or one more resident to Smooch, it becomes a linear waiting game where all you can do is Hope you know the Solution the next time around. Those games are created with so many Residents and so many Monsters to Catch on purpose, so that the next time around, you'll do things differently, and you'll discover new things. Stray Children was a valiant attempt, but I sadly don't think I'll be finishing it. It's a game I've been forcing myself to play since the "Hey Remember Our Old Game?" effect wore off about 2 hours in. It's a game I desperately tried to like and sadly failed. I think with a few key changes it could be really enjoyable, but as it stands, the game's implicit message is a mixed misunderstanding of what made the previous games so wonderful. A true Heartbreaker. Thanks for reading.

Stray Children is a wonderful experience, while it may have influences it is distinctly not those influences. It is definitely a companion piece to MOON RPG. Ignore any review complaining about anything like Undertale, those are tourist filth.

I think that Stray Children is the perfect example of an amazing idea ruined by a refusal to compromise. While your artistic vision is important to consider and stay true to, you need to stay cognizant of whether or not it is singularly -your- vision. There are so many obtuse happenings in this game that I have no idea how the creators thought anyone but them would understand what was being put in front of them. Even worse, guides for this game are nearly non-existent, so finding the solution means wandering around aimlessly until something happens. Case in point: the prison experience. Without being told anything at all, you are expected to know that: -You have to speak to the disappearing and reappearing little guy three times -You have to walk around the courtyard in circles until the snowmen rotate and move out of the way of the tower door -You have to interact with the guy's train when it backs up, but ONLY when he's yawning and ONLY from the side facing the tower -You have to pull a broken rope multiple times to allow you access to a back area ALL of this is not communicated to you in any way shape or form, without even a single hint. This is just one chunk of the experience with Stray Children that you will have from start to finish and in the multiple hours I played, it never got better. Do you think that's confusing? Let's look at the logic behind the "Olders": -The PE Teacher who is mean to his students is solved by saying "Apple, Lunch, Outside, Nobody, Everybody" and the clue is "he is too hard on his students." -The Bird is solved by going "Hoo Hoo, Caw Caw, Chirp Chirp" and the clue is "I want to erase my being." Reading other reviews, I see that a recurring sentiment is that "games for everybody are games for nobody" and "this is not Undertale." I think that's a cowardly cop-out, especially in this situation. The people who made this game are a team of industry veterans who have been crafting great experiences since the PS1, and they know how to tackle this specific type of "anti-game" better than almost anybody else. Reading through the dialogue gives you an unsettling "boomer comic energy" with the things they say about Society, and this strange out-of-touch-ness seeps into every other part of the game design like a poisonous miasma. It is not subversive, it is not creative, it is not even confrontational - it is simply tedious for the sake of refusing change. The utter and banal pretentiousness with which this game's handful of fans speak about it doesn't help the situation either - the only defense ever offered is "you just don't get it" or "it's not for you", the siren call of the rejected idea. The Paul boss opened my eyes to the greatness that this game could have achieved, as an absolute visual and audio treat, with a solid clue you can find that makes the fight fun to figure out, and it makes the rest of the game even more unforgivable. What seems to be a fantastic artistic endeavor is constantly hamstrung by a refusal to budge on the most archaic of ancient adventure game tropes and unfortunately, it just straight up isn't fun anymore. Please, anyone playing this game who makes your own games, again, use this as a cautionary tale that sometimes, you need to consider the player or even the best intentions will be ruined.

I have waited years for this game. Kimura-sans games along with other games that spun off from Love-de-Lic have been favorites of mine ever since I played Chulip almost 20 years ago. I wish I could say this game exceeded my expectations but too many things rubbed me the wrong way. Firstly, the game completely lifts it's battle system from Undertale. It brings a few things to the table to make it feel a little more unique and I would say the presentation and execution of it is leaps and bounds better than Undertale ever was, but it still nonetheless is lacking in originality which is sad to see. If nothing new could be done, I would have preferred to just stick to the classic Moon and Chulip formula of solving overworld puzzles for the NPCs as that is the aspect I am most fond of from these games. To give credit where it's due, the TALK puzzles during battle are good and very clever. It seems like most people did not like them and had trouble understanding them but I was able to save all of the Olders on my own without a guide (most of them anyway, more on that later). For the Olders where the answer is not clear, it's easy enough to try out a few combinations of TALK options and get a good idea of what the solution is. I always felt smart for figuring them out. The actual combat and dodging attacks however is incredibly difficult. There are several attacks in the game I could not figure out how to avoid and even seemed impossible. The one based on Frogger comes to mind, the turtles sink too quickly and there's no way to tell when they will go underwater, you also move way too slowly to be able to correct your position. I don't inherently mind that the game is difficult, but since death means starting over from your last save point, this means you can lose a lot of progress to attacks that don't feel very fair and having to rebattle Olders you already saved. There were several times when battling an Older I hadn't seen yet where they got to attack first and I immediately died because I could't figure out the attack pattern in time. My second and most major complaint is what ruined the game for me entirely. There are several permanently miss-able items in the game and if you miss even one of them, you do not get an ending. I cannot possibly forgive this. I was as thorough and careful as possible in my initial play-through of the game, it took me 22 hours to get to the end which as far as I understand is double the average time it is supposed to take and even then I still missed 2 items which meant I saved all but 3 Olders. Some of these items only appear during literally 1 attack in an Older battle, I didn't even see a treasure chest spawn so I'm not sure if it's even something that is guaranteed. If you miss any of these items at any point you might as well delete your save game and start over because, after finishing the final boss, if you didn't complete everything the screen just fades to black and says "The End" and returns you to the beginning of the game. No cutscene, no dialogue, not even credits. It felt like a slap in the face and like I had just pissed 22 hours of my life away for nothing. I may be wrong but neither Moon or Chulip has anything that can be missed like this, so to me it was not something I should have reasonably expected. Kimura-san tends to put frustrating and tedious elements into his games on purpose (at least I think it's on purpose), however they usually fit the overall narrative and you come to understand why the game was made like that by the end and you even grow to like it. This is frustrating and tedious for no reason at all. You missed an item so you have to play the entire game over again. It is completely pointless and a waste of time. There is still plenty to like about the game. The visuals are outstanding. This is the absolute best attempt I have ever seen at recreating that old SNES/PlayStation pre-rendered art style. Many other indie games try to recreate these visuals but always fall flat, for the most part Stray Children looks like it genuinely was made 30 years ago with period accurate tools. This is also the best atmosphere I have ever experienced in any game, period. The music is also fantastic. I loved all the characters and thought the writing was very charming. And despite being disappointed that I didn't get to see the ending, the journey itself was great. Overall, I'm just too mixed on Stray Children. When I was loving it, I was loving it. Once I realized I would have to play the entire game over because I didn't find a little sparkle on the ground one time, I couldn't help but hate the game. I also wish it did it's own thing instead of copy Undertale, ironically enough Undertale itself copied so much from Moon and nobody has ever really spoken up about that, but unfortunately because of this I think Stray Children will just perpetually live in Undertales shadow. With different gameplay and the miss-able items taken out of the equation, this game could have been an instant classic for me, but as it is now I don't think I liked it and I can't be bothered to play the game again to see the true ending. If I ever do, maybe I will update my review but until then, this is it. Edit: I've been informed that there is indeed an ending even if you don't manage to complete absolutely everything, it's just hidden. I was able to reload my old save and find it. It's a bit better than nothing but still pretty unsatisfying and doesn't really change my opinion or invalidate my previous review. The missable items are still a big detractor for me and I still am not inclined to replay the entire game to get them. I also wanted to clarify I don't actually like Undertale incase that wasn't clear lol.

Love the setting, music, art, writing, scenarios. Going in I thought this was going to be a 10/10 for me. Sad to say I can't recommend this yet because of how much friction I'm experiencing with the Older fights, linear level design, points of no return, missable items and basic QoL features missing or hidden behind talking to NPCs. Other reviews and discussions in the community hub have articulated these issues better than I can, and I'm willing to change my review if some of these issues are remedied. If you're set on playing through the game, I recommend straight up fighting the Olders if you don't feel confident in the clues provided to purify them. That might relieve some of the frustration I've experienced.

The art style and story is very intriguing. As someone that was a huge fan of Moon, I sadly have to recommend against getting this game. It seems the devs wanted to transform their IP into a more deltarune-esque gameplay loop. This sadly falls flat on its face within an hour of playing. The combat is the worst aspect of this game by far. You move your character around at a snails pace to try and dodge the enemies attacks (i.e. deltarune and undertale). If you are like most people and attempting to do a pacifist type route, you will be met with 6 “talk” options that serve as a means to try and pacify the enemy. The thing is that these 6 options are all going to be trial and error with little to no relation of the lore of the creature you’re facing. You are essentially guess and checking and praying you dont get hit. Unlike in deltarune where the talk options clearly relate to the characters, enemy, and overall themes of the story. The talk options here are random garbage you will be scrolling through trying to get the right one. Depending on the enemy you will have to do this multiple times. The second enemy you go up against is a bird type monster where even if you do guess correctly from the 6 talk options the one you need CAN CHANGE. YEAH you now have to do a 1/6 dice roll AGAIN. The combat is pure garbage. I was really excited for this game and its just so unpolished when it comes to the actual gameplay.

This makes me really sad to say but... this game is bad. it has amazing visuals, sound, a very interesting world and I want to know more about it but the gameplay, man. The gameplay is just not there. The fights with Olders are so tedious, inscrutable, and so very, very long. There was probably an issue with the localization, sure, because whatever information we're supposed to glean from the clues given in order to do the correct "talk" patterns is essentially useless for 80% of the fights, but the gameplay itself is bad, too. Every action you take results in a long, long, LONG attack pattern that is just a nuissance, even if you're doing things correctly. When you're trying to figure out a talk sequence to beat someone and it's 5 or more answers deep, every single mistake puts you right back to the beginning, and you have to redo every single attack pattern again. It is just not fun. There's nothing compelling here. You walk slow, the attack patterns are sometimes absolute horseshit, and sometimes the damage they do is through the roof. It feels like there was a misunderstanding about what made Undertale/Deltarune challenging and they just did a poor job trying to incorporate it with the Moon format? The result is a mess. I want to keep playing it because I'm interested in seeing what happens, but jesus christ, for your own sanity, watch someone else play it.

beautiful... gorgeous... jimmy neutron

Undertale but good.