They’ve pulled it off. Every song in Stray Gods unfolds as a seamless musical experience, even though you’re frequently choosing how Grace performs it. Does she go hard and spark up a musical battle with someone, or try to win them over with a crooning duet? Does she try to outwit someone with wordplay or let someone else take the spotlight for a few bars?

“The player is so much more invested in the outcome because it’s their personal choices that are involved,” Gaider says. “It’s particular to games that have branching narratives and an element of choice and agency, but it’s not one that people are overly familiar with. For players that enjoy branching narratives, that enjoy having agency, it’s an amazing experience. You’re having a romance, let’s say, because you chose that romance. You’re not just a passive observer.”

You can’t win a song. Earlier versions of Stray Gods had more complex game mechanics, but the team quickly found that these prevented players from listening to the music. “They spent the song trying to figure out how to get the outcome that they wanted. And then we had to have a long conversation: do we want people to play the song or enjoy the song?”

Some players familiar with choice-driven games wouldn’t be fazed by all the plate-spinning, “but we also thought: this is the kind of game that somebody who just enjoys musicals might hear about ... Even what a gamer would consider to be a relatively simple mechanic is quite a substantial bar for entry for most people.”

Once the nuts and bolts were sorted, the game began to win over a cast of performers that reads as a who’s who of voice acting. Troy Baker – the lead in games such as The Last of Us – came on as vocal director and was quickly joined by a host of actors accustomed to voicing the kinds of AAA games you see plastered on the sides of buses.

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Anjali Bhimani plays Medusa in Stray Gods. “Usually, when you are recording games, you will go down a list of line, line, line, line, line and record it three times, go to the next one, you record it three times and so, similarly, we were doing that with different branches of the music.

“You would record it one time through with these choices and then say, OK, if a player makes this choice, these four measures switch to these four measures. So now we need you to record those four measures, but we need to make sure that you record it in a way that actually smoothly aligns with the previous one.”

It’s a huge ask – a four-minute song in Stray Gods might actually need 40 minutes of recorded material. “It was a lot of cutting and pasting in your own brain, which was really, really, fun and reminded me so much of the early development stages of a musical, and to be in those stages where you’re like ‘that doesn’t work, what if we take this and move it over here?’,” Bhimani says.

She has voiced roles in billion-dollar franchises such as Overwatch and Apex Legends but says the stellar lineup of talent performing in Stray Gods is testament to the passion behind the indie project.

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She hopes the curious will seek it out, and that it inspires other creatives to be similarly ambitious. “I cannot wait for the world to have this. How cool is this? It’s a brand-new genre.”

Stray Gods is available now on Nintendo Switch, Xbox and X/S, PC and PS4/5.

Stray Gods’ ground-breaking soundtrack will feature in Orchestra Victoria’s Indie Symphony: Videogames in Concert, September 8, Hamer Hall.