Stray Children is a very weird game, but in a way that to me feels very deliberate. Engaging with Stray Children feels not unlike engaging with a piece of abstract or surrealist art to me; it will deny you clear, concrete answers, but what you take away from it will be a function of what you bring to it.

There are a few reviews here where other users have expressed frustration with the ways that this game can feel obtuse and arbitrary, which I think is fair, but I also think that its opaqueness is ultimately in service of the game's themes. To me Stray Children is about the gap in understanding between children and adults. You play as a child who's trying to figure out what happened to their missing dad, and on your journey you will meet many child characters that are subject to the whims of adults whose motives they can't understand. It's true that the peaceful route involves a lot of puzzles that feel more like guess and check than like they have any sort of logical solution, and you can even lock yourself out of solving them by missing completely arbitrary hidden clues, but I think mechanically that captures the feeling of being a child trying to navigate the complicated feelings of adults. I would argue that this game is often trying on purpose to evoke feelings of confusion, helplessness, and frustration, and I think it succeeds at that. If I had to ding its mechanics though, I do think the choice to have the bullet hell sections be isometric rather than top down was a mistake. It can be very hard in some fights to gauge where exactly in space the bullets are relative to you, in a way that I don't think adds anything.

Stray Children is a game I had to think really hard about to find any meaning in, so it feels kind of beautiful and ironic that one of the meanings I ultimately landed on was "Don't drive yourself crazy looking for meaning. There are some things you won't be able to understand, and that's okay". If you play this game you might walk away with a completely different understanding than I did of what even happened on a literal textual level. But isn't that kind of neat?