Hey, that Nintendo Direct we had yesterday? Pretty cool, right? But unless you watched the Japanese version of the Direct, you probably missed one of the coolest hidden gems to come out of the show: a little game called Stray Children.
Stray Children appeared exclusively in the Japanese Nintendo Direct. The game follows a young boy who is sucked into a TV into a world made up entirely of children, where he goes on a strange adventure. We don't know too much about the project just yet, but it seems to be an RPG, and something about the way the boy is interacting with the monsters he encounters looks familiar...
Yup, if you're watching the trailer and thinking it looks a bit like Undertale, you're not wrong. You see, developer Onion Games is a Tokyo-based indie run by Yoshiro Kimura, who was a game designer on a 1997 game called Moon: RPG Remix Adventure. Initially, Moon was only ever released in Japan, and was a strange "anti-RPG" that was in many ways ahead of its time. But the unique ways it questioned the formula of traditional RPGs ultimately inspired many of the themes and ideas in Toby Fox's Undertale nearly two decades later. And the success of Undertale in turn inspired Onion Games and Kimura to return to Moon in 2021 and release the game worldwide for Nintendo Switch.
Just in case it wasn't crystal clear: yes, #StrayChildren will be localized and released outside Japan!
— Onion Games (@oniongames) September 14, 2023
Our release date is still TBD, but please don't worry!
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Now, with Stray Children, Kimura and his studio appear to be exploring something like a spiritual successor to Moon that has learned from a number of other, similar games in the same tradition. Thus far, it doesn't have a release date either in Japan or in the West, but Onion Games is reassuring that this game won't be locked to Japan the way Moon was for so long. And an English version of the trailer is expected soon. So while we wait eagerly for Deltarune Chapter 3, keep this little gem of a game in the back of your mind.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
