Vidjama Gmaes Work

Oh yeah. I played the demo for El Paso, Elsewhere a while back and really loved its gameplay. Yes, it’s Max Payne as an indie game and there’s nothing wrong with that. You play as James Savage, the lovechild of Max Payne and Blade. Savage travels to a motel in El Paso, Texas to hunt down his ex-girlfriend who just happens to be a vampire lord named Draculae. You have to kill Draculae before she enacts her plan to destroy the world.

I love this game. And like many of my more favorite titles, El Paso, Elsewhere is a combination of a lot of little things that bring the experience together into a whole package. For example I really like how the game has these statue guys that stay still until it needs them to activate. But rather than give them unfair invincibility, you can always just stab them for an instant preemptive kill or shoot them. How the turntables turn the tables.

Every level is a new floor where you run around, kill monsters, rescue innocents, and then make your way back to the elevator. As the game progresses you get access to a bigger arsenal of guns, most of which fall into your standard shooter fare. Pistols, shotgun, machine guns, grenade launchers, molotov cocktails. The game doesn’t particularly force you to use specific weapons on specific enemies, but you do figure out pretty quickly what works best on what. For example it’s easier for everyone if you stake a statue before it activates and in most levels there are stakes virtually everywhere. Big groups of enemies can be clumped into one spot to make easy fodder for your molotov or grenade launcher. And you should probably save your powerful rifle ammo for enemies that are best picked off from afar.

Combat is where my opinions on El Paso, Elsewhere start to get muddied. You can jump and dive around like in Max Payne and activate bullet time mode, but in Max Payne using all the tools available was pretty much a requirement to stay alive. You were one man against an army of goons with guns, and if you stopped moving you were dead. Most of the enemies you fight against in El Paso don’t have ranged weapons making large parts of the game incredibly easy. To compensate each level is mostly set in very cramped rooms and corridors. It’s impressive how much the game reuses scenery while avoiding making the levels feel repetitive.

The game starts off stupidly easy and then at one point it gets ridiculously difficult. El Paso, Elsewhere’s combat is a big test, and that test is of your ability to take a lot of information in and prioritize on the run. Some enemies absolutely need to be taken care of first, like the guys who teleport around and throw big balls of energy that follow your movement and can straight up one-hit kill you. Fights get chaotic fast and death comes quick, especially in later levels where the game goes for quantity over quality and just starts overwhelming you with piles of demons.

And this is where I think a lot of people are going to eventually get bored with El Paso, Elsewhere. There are only a few enemy types and by the halfway point you’ve seen all of them. So if the story isn’t doing it for you and the gameplay is getting stale, it’s only going to get worse as you fight the exact same half dozen enemies over and over again but in bigger numbers.

It’s very easy to die from panic. The game forces you to manually reload when you run out of ammo, and before that fully registered in my brain it did cause some early game deaths. I’m not complaining about that by the way, it’s one of the few truly genuine moments of unforced difficulty.

El Paso, Elsewhere stands strong on two things; its story and its soundtrack. The soundtrack melds perfectly with the action and eases the pain of repetition. It gets you pumped up for the next shootout, and I listen to it now even when I’m not playing the game. The story is also fantastic. Draculae was an abusive partner long before the whole end of the world scheme, and despite everything that’s happened to him James still believes there’s a chance everything can be right again because of one single good day they had a long time ago. It’s a story that might be a little too familiar to those who have experienced abusive relationships first hand. But also with a vampire lord.

There are some technical problems that you may or may not encounter. For starters, it’s possible to get lodged between props and the wall and just get jettisoned out of the map. I had a few times where James got stuck in the diving position like in this clip right here. And there’s a level that’s set in a meat grinder that is the only time the game truly crapped the bed on the PlayStation. It has to do with the numerous physics objects and the game just about falls apart in this level. I’m shocked it didn’t crash.

Should you play El Paso, Elsewhere? Normally this is where I would say play it on PC because it’s a shooter but the PS5 controller did hold up quite well. And yes, you should play this. It’s a fun shooter with an even better story.