It’s IGF season, which means I get to play indie games I wouldn’t normally get, which means I played El Paso, Elsewhere. I’m about an hour in, and I’m gonna try to finish it. So here’s my initial thoughts.
I don’t like this game. I want to like this game. So I’ll list off what I liked first:
- The music (besides the rap tracks) is excellent, great ambience and veering between weird styles.
- The pacing of the story is smartly constructed. I want to continue learning about the relationship at the heart of the story, and the game is very effectively doing “reveal additional details, and” hook to pull me forward.
- Visual style is nice, low-poly and grimy pixel textures mixed with surrealist lighting.
Unfortunately, I am a huge curmudgeon, so there’s a lot that I think this game fails at.
The noir writing is extremely superficial. It has the veneer of noir - husky voices talking in low tones about how much they regret being a drug addict - but it lacks the bone-deep nihilism and slimy sleaze that characterizes the genre to me. As a result it feels too sanitized, too normal.
Relatedly, the game lays the broad plot all on the surface. Noir, neo or otherwise, is primarily characterized by the formula of the low-class, asshole-with-heart-of-gold (or just asshole) protagonist stumbling into a conspiracy via small cases. The classic example is either finding a missing person or infidelity, but really it can be anything that causes them to be buffeted by forces too powerful for them to control or resist. In Max Payne, it’s his family getting butchered. That’s not present here, really. The protagonist immediately tells us what’s going on, and there’s not really hints of conspiracy so far, just a gradual unfolding of his relationship with Draculae (which, while the bright spot of writing for the game, lacks the oomph to carry it).
It’s impossible not to compare this game to Max Payne thanks to the slo-mo diving and noir feel, but the actual “game” part of it is so, so much worse, to the point that I wonder if people comparing it to Max Payne have played Max Payne in recent memory.
There’s literally no reason to dive or slo-mo dive in this game, at least within the time I’ve played. Every combat encounter is solvable by casually kiting enemies via backpedaling, because so far the enemies are primarily just melee guys that charge straight at you. The camera is in a bad position that causes a shooting dead zone, so if an enemy gets closer than about 4 meters, you’re required to use your one-hit-kill melee stakes, which drop from any wooden object and which I never ran out of.
It’s so easy I quickly started getting bored. Which sucks because there is a LOT of very repetitive combat in this game. It has the structure of an arcade game - enter level, save hostages, leave level - but none of the difficulty or complication that would eat your quarters. If I’m doing this much combat just to get the morsels of narrative I’m actually interested in, it better be fun, and it is not.
Compare this to Max Payne, as everyone else is doing, and it becomes clear why. Max Payne is HARD (arguably too hard, but that’s okay for purposes of illustration). It requires you fully engage with the diving mechanic to get the drop on guys or dodge fire, because you take tons of damage from enemies shooting you with bullets. Resources are very limited, so precision and care is required. The dive is not just a fun aesthetic element to feel cool, it is a core part of the combat loop that every encounter in the game has been designed around. Some bits could be tuned a little easier - a little less damage on being shot, a little more painkillers and ammo - but the game at least demands you engage with it.
In the IGF judging comments, I described El Paso, Elsewhere as “an all-ages community center stage play version of Max Payne”. Despite all the blood, the violence implied and literal, the awful rap about pulling a gat from a lockbox and doing a mass shooting… the game simply lacks the proper edge. It doesn’t have the anguish, the pain redirected from protagonist to player that makes something like this compelling. In its place is, sure, a well-paced (if only superficially noir) story about falling in love and being abused / betrayed, but that’s it.
Now for something personal.
Someone said I’ve been amping myself up to hate this game since it came out, and I think that’s true. I hate to admit it, but I have to be honest.
Concretely, I watched someone play the demo a while ago and my mood immediately went from interest to distaste. Pretty much every complaint I leveled above was present in that demo. I feel like I have very understandable and direct complaints about what the game is.
Abstractly… maybe this is related to my disdain for “hopepunk” and the like, but the sanitizing of what is to me a fundamentally sleazy, boundary-pushing genre rubs me the wrong way. Perhaps this is tainted by my perception of Xalavier as pushing a “christian identity” into his games, which is probably unfair of me and borne of my own trauma with the church. He seems like a very nice fellow! I don’t want to hurt his feelings by being harsh on his work because of my issues! Several people I know like and work with him, including the person who did the soundtrack to this game!
Which makes me question my capability to properly criticize it. It’s certainly doing quite well in the critical circuit, including Steam reviews. Although, it should be noted, when I went to see if anyone else had a negative feeling on the game, almost every negative Steam review reflected my complaints above.
So yeah. Did not care for El Paso, Elsewhere.
