The Haunted Hoard: El Paso, Elsewhere (PS5)
When you’re up against a werewolf that’s going for your throat or a biblically accurate fallen angel trying to smite you, it’s a bit easier to pull the trigger than needing to kill someone you loved to save the entire world. The third person shooter El Paso, Elsewhere does have you play as a monster hunter whose weapons can easily sweep the floor with the fiends he encounters, but at the end of that road of slaughter lies the person hardest to kill, not because she’s the strongest necessarily, but because if he could have stood up to her long ago, he might not have ever been in this mess in the first place.
James Savage heads to a small motel in El Paso, Texas when his ex, the queen of the vampires Draculae, begins a ritual to contact the powers beyond, ready to sacrifice the world to find fulfillment in her birthright. To even cope with the enormity of the task, both in its stakes and the willpower it takes to face her, Savage has already filled himself with enough pills that they’ll be what kills him if the monsters don’t. As he heads to the motel and sees it spill into a void where reality is rearranged into halls full of monsters and hostages in need of rescuing before they’re sacrificed, all he can do is move forward, but with each floor he can’t help but reflect on the difficulty of taking the path ahead.
Despite its supernatural stakes and the low-poly art style for the characters seemingly to pay tribute to the early Max Payne games, James Savage’s relationship with Draculae weighs down on him in a brutally realistic way. Before it ever became about shooting up vampires in an otherworldly space, it was love, and before you’ve ever seen Draculae yourself, you hear about the early days of their relationship in both small insignificant moments and the ones that made Savage fall head over heels for her. However, throughout the game, James relays his thoughts in a world-weary monotone, many scenes between floors rather quick despite a slow methodical delivery where even the gaps f silence between speaking seem to carry great weight. As life-affirming as the relationship had once been, Draculae’s treatment of James gradually turned toxic and abusive in chilling down-to-earth ways. There’s an uncomfortable realism to how the decline unfolded as relayed by Savage and never protested by Draculae once she does make herself known, a power dynamic that exploited his love but was reinforced by moments he could cling to as he thought there was still a piece of the old relationship in there. It makes his descent to face her painful to watch, a man who has wrecked himself in more ways than one just to get here also still struggling to muster up the motivation to turn against her despite everything that happened before and will happen now. The metaphor of a vampire leeching life from someone is a bit easy to pull from it, but the supernatural layers over other ideas like domination and infidelity don’t need to be pulled back too far to see how it mirrors a true to life toxic relationship, and some excellent writing that has Savage grappling with it all while being understated or finding poetic ways to share his thoughts gives El Paso, Elsewhere it’s most fascinating element to consider well after you’ve cleared its 50 levels.
Despite the heavy themes and the careful care in rolling out information for the story, El Paso, Elsewhere’s gameplay is a lot more about sudden quick action. As you explore the void, you’ll pass through surreal areas mirroring real spaces like the motel, a graveyard, or even Egyptian tombs, these spaces having meaning for Savage to gradually realize but the supernatural rearrangement also makes them good hosts for some twitchy action. In many levels, your objective is to find and rescue the hostages meant for Draculae’s ritual, these humans easy enough to save once you find them but they can die if you aren’t too careful around them and will influence the ending if you let too many perish. Mostly, hostages are a means to give you direction in the game’s stages, a light pillar above the walking space often giving you a good sense for the direction to go with the player needing to be ready for whatever monsters are along the way. At first, El Paso, Elsewhere plays it a little too safe, its most common enemy being vampires in mummy wrappings that mostly just walk towards you quickly. Corner ambushes, sudden hordes, or even doors that suddenly appear to dump them into the same room as you does allow them to have some potency despite their simple attack style, but usually when the game focuses on them it can be a bit plain gunning them down.
El Paso, Elsewhere rolls out new monster types though that start to lead to a much greater need to be quick and reactive when exploring. Werewolves hide in the darkness save for glowing eyes and will pounce on you, dealing severe damage. Healing pills can be found and used to recover, but a good ambush can sometimes wipe you out immediately, good checkpointing allowing that to not be too devastating but you learn to watch carefully as you explore lest the werewolves snag you. The enemy ranks expand at a better pace once foes like the energy ball firing dead brides join the group, and you start getting stages with more formidable fiends and larger groupings to up the danger level and necessitate smart weapon use. From the very start though you do have an ability on your side that continues the game’s Max Payne tributes, the player able to slow time down and even do a slow-motion dive so they have time to line up their shots better. Ambushes aren’t going to spell doom when you can immediately activate it and be the one who comes out on top even if the energy for the feature must be built up over time, but El Paso, Elsewhere is also a solid enough shooter you can play much of it without ever needing to tap into this useful tool.
Your weapons are a good arsenal for the task and much like the enemies, it takes a bit for them to really get going only for it to become a spread that adds to your battle considerations effectively. Your default pair of pistols are a little weak but can still take down a lot of standard foes with just a few shots, but the other weapons all fill a niche. Shotgun is a perfect “get off me” tool or an effective way at taking out the more durable foes in an instant like the armored knights. The rifle is slow to fire, but land your shot right and most any foe can be taken out with one hit. The uzi and Repeater feel like they’d overlap as automatics, but the uzi feels like it’s meant more for up-close crowd clearing compared to the Repeater being a nice tool for dealing consistent quick damage when other weapons might need their ammo preserved. You can swap between all weapons quickly and ammo keeps you thinking about how you want to utilize them, with some like the grenade launcher really asking you to pick your moment since it won’t get refills easily, but there is also the ever important wooden stake to consider.
A swing of a stake can kill most any foe but it can only really hit a monster if it is right up against you. You can carry five of them and destroying objects in the void might spawn them, but they’re great as a last resort while still being key to some fights. Bosses and minibosses all have segmented health bars where you need to deplete their life and then stake them to open up the next portion. The game’s few bosses can be a bit lengthy, mostly because the boss in the middle of the game in particular can kill you rather quickly and force a level restart, but they do seem to be meant to have obvious patterns you’re meant to learn so you can dodge and wear them down. The time this can take isn’t the best, and in general El Paso, Elsewhere feels a little bloated with more levels than ideas for how to design them. With some levels also featuring spoken word rap that doesn’t feel like the best accompaniment to the monster blasting, there are moments where the game might lose you a bit as it isn’t moving along quickly enough to more concrete ideas and layouts. Many of the levels can be quite quick to clear if you’re bold though which benefits retries or allows you push through more motel floors to get to things like the burning mansion or butcher shop sections that get more adventurous with floor designs. Perhaps if you didn’t have to be ever watchful for the strength of enemy attacks you could zip through more easily, but the action won’t have the time to truly get old before the game properly shifts gears to something new.
THE VERDICT: El Paso, Elsewhere provides some quality monster blasting action with a good range of guns and creatures even if it’s a bit slow to roll them out across a somewhat bloated set of 50 levels. Thankfully, the tension of the action keeps things exciting and you will find intriguing layouts to push you to use your arsenal and slow-mo trickery to survive long term. Bosses and the music can be a bit hit and miss too despite the general design coming out more positive in general, but it’s the brutal picture of James Savage’s tortured soul that really brings things home and patches over those weaker moments. The complicated and well written look at a painful abusive relationship makes even the smallest comment from Savage impactful, the plot carrying you when the action gets a little repetitive before it reaches newer ideas.
And so, I give El Paso, Elsewhere for PlayStation 5…
A GOOD rating. Masterful writing is the biggest draw of El Paso, Elsewhere, and the performance from Xavier Nelson Jr. brings such a complicated character to life well. He isn’t waxing philosophical for the sake of it, each thing he says is a thought heavy with contemplation as it ties back to his conflict… although he does get a little indulgent occasionally and enjoys the much less complex monster blasting at times too. There’s certainly a pain in seeing bits of his good memories before you start to break through and hear the darker times he had with Draculae resurface, the relationship never reaching more easily addressed types of abuse. You don’t get the easy off-ramp of Draculae ever directly hurting him or saying something reprehensible, which is why she still has a hold over Savage that he’s grappling with over the course of the game. Killing Draculae to save the world is almost just the emotional battle to truly leave her after he learned to love someone who mistreated him, and seeing his thoughts evolve and shift is the most interesting through line of El Paso, Elsewhere. The action can meander though despite having a good set of basics in place. The focus on managing your arsenal well as the enemy and weapon variety expands makes for involved play even if the danger level of your enemies perhaps slows your exploration a bit to avoid quick ends. The levels definitely can be blitzed through though once you get a feel for the game and the level design doesn’t lean on truly cheap tricks, and while boss fights could have used a bit more grace periods to come to grips with them to start the learning process better, El Paso, Elsewhere mostly feels like it has a good eye for action but not a good idea how long each idea should last. Even with fifty levels it won’t take too long to reach the end, but a quicker start and maybe a few less levels with unclear directions would help it reach that ending more gracefully.
El Paso, Elsewhere can give you blood-pumping battles and more measured moments with its action, the player sometimes acting on instinct and at others trying to carefully utilize all their options so they don’t come up short. Its story side doesn’t interrupt for long but does so deftly, building up to its more complicated looks at the core relationship even if it also weirdly indulges in rap or weird parody collectibles to find. The tone might not be all there but it also keeps you from being more mired in the brutal reality of the painful love between Savage and Draculae, and while balance isn’t something El Paso, Elsewhere always gets right, your time with it still does find its footing more often than it teeters to make it an overall worthwhile trip.