This game is literal perfection. The gameplay, inspired by Max Payne, merges everything perfectly. Every weapon has a utility. Every enemy is different enough to change your strategies and try different thing. Every level is a masterpiece. Every song kicks in at the perfect moments to create the perfect combat encounters to create the perfect experience. The story is top-tier and covers topics I haven't seen before in another game. Every single aspect of this game just lands so, so well. The characters, especially Savage, is just... Amazing. The performances are amazing. The writing and humor is amazing. It is scary how amazingly good this game is. I'm going to follow this company closely, because this game left me wanting so, so much more. Everyone should play this game.

This is one of those games where I find putting a star rating on it feels... inaccurate? Incomplete. Much like my time with the game I suppose.

I've taught myself not to just power through and finish a game as maybe I would have a decade or more ago. So when my interest started to wane and I looked up how many chapters were left, it didn't help to learn I was only half way through. I pushed ahead a little more but hitting a brick wall of a boss fight, I decided to cut my losses. The gameplay is good, the story is good, and the music is great. Honestly, it's a good game and the people who are good at it will love it. It just is long without justifying that length and odd difficulty spikes on the "intended" settings.

played this through for the distinct locales and stylishly framed between-level-cutscenes

nails a couple of scenes relating to abusive relationships that could have easily whiffed entirely

ultimately, i'd much rather play stuff like this; that tries new stuff, even if it (imo) misses more than it lands

because gameplay is flat and fails to convince me that max payne / hotline miami (clear influences) works vs mainly melee enemies

a typical level (there are 50) consists of: enter room; slow down time; click enemy heads with pistols (rarely need to bother with anything else other than a few rifle shots) before it aggros/attacks; end level. something like this https://streamable.com/vjyhz5, with bosses also struggling to shake things up https://streamable.com/50g1lg

difficulty emerges in the form of placing enemies behind blind corners, where they'll chunk your health while you wrestle the janky reticle into working up close

i feel like there's a game half as long, taking itself half as seriously, that really gets at what made it's inspirations tick: each room is a puzzle, you have limited but meaningful tools - how will you solve this room?

A game heavily inspired by max payne that punishes the player when you dive (shootdodge).
I only played the first 4 or 5 levels, but it became clear that the easiest way to kill your enemies is to simply tap slow mo and pop them in head.
Trying to be flashier and diving while using slow mo is uneffective because it actually makes it harder to hit your enemies. Not to mention that the levels are quite small and if you dive, you will often hit a wall.
The enemies seem to lack attack animations, they just get close to you and you lose health.
The voice acting, soundtrack and mood of the game seemed quite interesting but the gameplay is highly disappointing for me
If you're looking for max payne 4, this is not it

El Paso Elsewhere is one of my favourite games of this year.

It is a game that caters to the nostalgia of the player, with mechanics and storytelling nods to the first two Max Payne games, but is also about the concept of nostalgia, in the form of how one remembers and thinks about past relationships and how this inflects upon who you are today.

This combination is neat enough as the premise for a game but it layers on:
- very tone-appropriate voice acting with some very good overly wrought noir feelings,
- great music tracks that aren't just a nod to what you would find in a Max Payne,
- some pretty interesting levels that, while 'simple', feel thematically interesting and make use of the game concept well
- includes adjustable difficulty sliders to adjust for people who either want a more pure narrative experience to glide through the combat or to scale up the difficulty to punishing is always a plus in my books

The ideal way of approaching playing it is to pick it up for 10-20 minutes at a time and get in a mission or two and then taking a break. I think taking breaks to do other things really helped improve how playing this game felt because as others have said, it is a bit repetitive in some ways but I never felt that get to me because it was nice to settle back into for each session.

Enjoy the elevator ride to nowhere; sometimes its about the journey your body takes and sometimes its about how your mind fills in the blank spaces.

a flawed gem that's greater than the sum of its parts but ultimately is held back by those scuffs

what is immediately obvious is that this game is less a tribute to max payne and the shooters of its time and more an ode to remedy as a creative force
it captures what makes their games so evocative while entirely being its own thing
right down to the full embrace of being a video game ass video game and not letting that hold back the work's ambitions
the little audio snippets that are solely there because the devs wanted to throw some funny shit in this otherwise overwhelmingly bleak experience
unless it's actually functioning as a narrative bolster, in which case
just as the majority of el paso, elsewhere's narrative
it's very effective

the reason to play this game is not because of its gameplay, not because that gameplay is bad but because it's simply pretty good in the face of some of the best story telling you'll see in a fully voiced indie game with like
two, maybe three voice actors
control rings heavy in the way shots are composed and the general approach to cutscene structure, but where el paso elevates is in its frankness
because while the story itself isn't necessarily the show stopper it's still got meat
james savage is addicted to painkillers, an addiction specified to have either started or have gotten way worse after leaving a harrowingly abusive relationship
unfortunately, his ex was fucking dracula(e)
in the pits of the void, she is conducting a ritual to take over the world, and the only person aware of it and able to do anything is the man she abused
fueled by a never ending, body destroying supply of opiods and experience as a monster hunter, he plunges deep on a one way trip to stop her
this element of addiction, trauma, and how they often fuel or occur in reaction to each other is the game's most overt theme
it does not sugar coat anything about it
i could be flowery and describe this game's cutscenes, how great the neo-noir writing is and all that shit, but i saw just a random one on twitter and was immediately convinced to give this game a go - something i otherwise would not have done
they're good, and they are absolutely worth the price of admission on their own
the performances from both leads are fantastic in spite of some scant few scenes stepping into melodrama territory made somewhat more apparent by how both leads (the two voices you're going to hear the most) are definitely playing against type
the protagonist is a black man voiced by a white man and it is immediately and jarringly obvious that this is the case
my white ass doesn't have a word to really say about it ethically given that this game is written and directed by a black man, but i will say that it was
once again
very obvious

which also branches into the first of my two biggest complaints with this game
the score is, partly, pretty damn great
the partly is, unfortunately, tragicly because of many tracks being what i can only describe as e-boy rap
there's shit on here that sounds like corpse husband is rapping on it and i fucking loathe it
no, this is not because i dislike rap music, the year is 202X of fucking course i like rap my guy
on the contrary, i've heard significantly better appear in video games (rap in video games often having a nerdy vibe in the first place) so when the same fucking voice that plays your main character is rapping about breaking shit and both of these vocal performances are going on at the same time it's extremely distracting
so i just really notice that i do not like these songs
it's not even just the vocals, the production sounds noticeably worse on these tracks
i cannot get past it, it completely sucked me out of the experience every time one showed up
and that's primariiy why i'm frustrated: everything else is working in this game's favor in terms of presentation and tone (even when the game's being overtly ridiculous, that shit's just funny)
so when one singular element that was very easy to leave out is just proding my brain over and over it's just
very annoying
i commend the effort, a lot of work went into these songs and given that the person who made them was the sound designer and also voiced the main protagonist (among others), that's a lot of shit to do
i've heard WAY worse - corpse husband's music is so much fucking worse than what's in this
but the vibe is the same, and it absolutely does not fit
a massive shame

the game's other big issue is that it's way too long
this is probably thematically relevant given that there's a lot of talk of the endurance of this journey taking its toll on james
but when the game's level design rarely gets all that varied or interesting, you're left with a gameplay loop that's good
but simple
i said before you don't wanna get this for the gameplay and that's because max payne this really isn't
it reminds me more of painkiller with a shoot dodge in the backrooms
and just like painkiller and other games like it unfortunately can be, it's repetetive and gets long in the tooth
this is a six-seven hour game and it could've easily been about four
what carried maxy payne was great level design and spectacle, neither of which this game has (most of the time)
which is honestly okay, this is NOT a bad game to play
i enjoyed most of my time with it
but combined with how easy this game generally is, i was counting down the remaining levels
there are fifty of them
i started doing this at about thirty
i stuck with this game because i loved how this story was told and i enjoyed how this game nailed the fundamentals
it felt good to shoot shit, so it wasn't really a slog
but still, way too long

but really? this game being ovwhemingly praised thus far is deserved
what it does well it does extremely well, and that effort should be commended
a story that centers a victim of domestic abuse that is also a hardboiled neo-noir gunslinger isn't something that you often see, let alone something that takes the former element as deadly serious as this game does
it feels personal and i love that
this game overall feels very personal and i will always appreciate that over what you often see in video game story telling
this feels like the game everybody working on it wanted to make
i hope that's the case, at least

definitely one of the highlights of the year, just don't let the comments of "it's just like max payne!!!!!" mislead you
it's not the same, and it's not as good

but the storytelling is, if not better

I was really unsure on whether I was liking the game or not. The combat felt fine, but the enemy design was not in line with its mechanics at all. Bullet time is damn near useless because every projectile enemy shoots explosives anyway so dodging those is a hail mary. Everything deals half your health or more so you either pick things off at a distance or circle strafe and get hit by jank collision damage anyway. Despite those issues I was still having fun enough. It felt like a roblox remake of Max Payne but it was still Max Payne and I like those games.
The story is weird. I don't like the protagonist. He's a sadboy drug addict like Max Payne but he's constantly giving reddit quips and talking about how good he is at killing things. Maybe my memory is fuzzy but Max Payne never said "Hell Yeaaaah!" after killing someone that was involved in murdering his entire family.
It was starting to work for me, the further it went. There's a really long cutscene about staying in an abusive relationship despite knowing it was bad for you because of the memory of a good time and it was starting to all come together. There's a cool intro to a boss fight, and then the fight was awful. Just a terrible, poorly thought out fight with telegraphs that are basically nonexistent. It was a fight so bad that it made me look back on the rest of the game and realize that if a game made me ask myself constantly if I was having fun or not, I wasn't having fun.

Also having your main char's VA narrate over the game constantly while the soundtrack is sung by the same VA and the sound effects from the monsters are also the same VA is one of the dumbest moves I think I've ever seen.

A bizarre, funny, well acted story in an interesting setting, with some of the best writing in the medium, mechanically and visually feels like playing a mixture of Max Payne and Control except with frequently boring repetitive gameplay and a length that has it stay long past its welcome.

El Paso, Elsewhere is visually similar to a Playstation era title with the movement and controls of the first two Max Payne titles with some of the colors and environment styles that can feel like you are playing Control. The story involves your character entering a motel to stop his ex, the lord of vampires, from destroying the world. He believes his addictions as well as the battles themselves will lead to his death. As you enter an elevator you are transported to the void and are slowly lowered down where floor after floor you must fight through an area while attempting to rescue people who have been captured to be used as sacrifices. As you your journey goes on the environments shift from the motel to areas that were important to your ex's life and some by extension important to your life. Memories of both your lives are discussed with entities you meet, each other, and can be further expanded on by finding projectors in stages themselves. Radios are also scattered around with often humorous stories or references to noir style monologue filled with increasingly ridiculous metaphors. The visual style and writing are the highlights of the game and can make it worth playing on their own merits. Though another issue is that it takes about 1/3 of the game for that writing to go beyond just being entertaining to reaching that next level.

The problems with the game come from the dull enemies that don't fit with the Max Payne bullet time style gameplay. That there are 50 stages and you only start to see more interesting things around 20 stages in. You are only given enough enemy variety for combat to be interesting and a bit varied, if the enemies were even fun to fight (which they typically aren't), around stage 26. Nothing interesting is ever done with the hostages you want to save, they are just sitting around waiting to be saved, there is no threat to them, no timed deaths, no real issue even if they do die from you killing them other than a slightly different ending. Even when the enemy variety is better and the stages become more interesting you are still doing the same thing over and over and with how long it took to get to the second half of the game I was just wanting it to end, keeping the slightly higher quality of the gameplay from making much of a difference at that point. As there can often be points where something narrative wise might only happen over other level it would have felt like a much better experience if about 1/3 of the stages had been cut.

There is a dull weightlessness to the combat where bullets hit enemies until they die and rarely feel like they did anything until that moment, you can take a massive hit that takes off 60+% of your health and not even know you got hit unless you look at your healthbar, the stake melee attacks are powerful damage wise but there is no visceral satisfaction for hitting an enemy with one. The entire Max Payne style gameplay of using a slow-motion toggle, diving, rolling, etc is almost entirely pointless due to the boring melee focused enemies and how you move with where the reticle is in relation to your body always makes aiming a bit awkward. Rolling becomes more useful about 27 stages in when there are some enemies with AoE attacks you can try to roll out of the way off but you never really want to dive into a room in slow motion shooting things because it isn't practical with these kinds of enemies and isn't even fun due to lack of any real response to your shots and lack of things like the killcam Max Payne games had. The only positive thing I can say for the gameplay is that there are great difficulty settings where you can alter anytime you start a new game or continue your current one, you can give yourself infinite ammo and stakes, change the speed, change how much slow motion time you have, change enemy and weapon damage, enemy health, etc and from playing on the base settings for 35 stages when I realized it was never going to become remotely enjoyable and I gave myself infinite stakes and ammo so I at least wouldn't be bothered with picking up supplies or needing to melee objects to try to find more stakes.

It's a game that I am glad that I played and will continue to think of in the future, especially now that the gameplay is over.

Has the annoying frequently found problem in PC titles where it doesn't disable your controller when using a keyboard and has no ability to turn off controller rumble, so if you keep a controller plugged in you will likely want to unplug it.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1784465308822237639

El Paso, Elsewhere is a third-person dungeon-crawling shooter featuring a vampire hunter that chased his ex-girlfriend (who happens to be a vampire) into a void. The game's style, story, and characters are the absolute highlights and were able to carry me to the end. A gripping story of love, trauma, and the scars left behind. James as a character was especially great. The snippets of him reflecting in the elevator between levels were a great reward pairing nicely with the rather short in-and-out level design. Watching him slowly grow more restless the longer he spends in the void and seeing him forced to face the trauma of his past was fantastic stuff. The surreal aesthetic that the void conjures works well with the experience. Additionally, the gunplay is fun, with the slow-mo ability and head-shot damage doing a lot of heavy lifting in creating a satisfying loop.
My personal biggest issue with this game is the enemy variety and environments. The enemies that were there were solid, but there just wasn't enough variety for the length of the game. Shooting the same werewolves and shambling vampires gets pretty dull by the end. While I generally enjoyed the level design itself, the environments leaned heavily on reusing assets. While the reuse is explained and justified story-wise, it results in a rather large number of levels being visually indistinguishable from one another. That coupled with a lack of verticality in level design made many levels play out very similarly. Either rescue civilians or find the colored keys to progress. I think both of these issues would have had less impact if the game itself was tightened up in length. As much as I loved the story, the levels just didn't always do it for me and I was forcing myself to finish by the end.

Overall, this was a good time and the game's story and style charmed me. Just need some more variety and a tightened experience.

The problem this game has is that it doesn't understand why the things it's aping are cool.

It claims to have been inspired by Hotline Miami for its combat, and these types of retro graphics games usually give up visual fidelity for gameplay, but you spend 80% of the game shooting the same basic enemy and the gameplay never reaches the frenetic highs of something like Hotline.

It clearly also takes inspiration from the noir genre and the hardboiled detective films of the 80s, but the writing here is so bad it sounds like parody. Every disgruntled word out of the protagonist sounds like sophomoric nonsense. It's like the writer didn't understand that Max Payne's name wasn't chosen because it sounded badass.

Finally, the music here is inspired by someone who likes to listen to rap for the beats. It's actually almost impressive how badly this game misinterprets the art it tries to emulate. It's a painfully long seven or eight hours to finish, and it's a functional product, but it's not worth playing for anyone outside of a Max Payne diehard who is curious about trying the dollar store version.

In summary,

"He's the one who likes all our pretty songs, and he
Likes to sing along and he likes to shoot his gun, but he
Knows not what it means"

El Paso Elsewhere is more than just a love letter to the original Max Payne games, it manages to carve out its own diverse lore, that feels wholly unique. The writing is incredible, from the opening cutscene, right until the emotional crescendo at the final moments. The gameplay itself is a little flawed, and there are some levels here that do feel a like a little filler, but the story alone was more than enough to carry me through those parts that were lacking. If you like noir adventures, and want to explore the dynamics of a mentally abusive breakup, this is definitely worth checking out ASAP.

El Paso, Elsewhere is fucking incredible. All I was expecting was a Halloween flavored Max Payne send up and while I definitely got that I think it's unfair for this game to live in that shadow. It takes so much from that series but rearranges and tweaks those things to achieve it's own identity.

I love urban fantasy. Dresden Files, Vampire The Masquerade, Blackwell. A supernatural underworld just below the surface of humanity. Often treating humans like cattle or at least disposable for their own purposes. I find it so interesting and El Paso is no exception. The little bits of worldbuilding we get paint a similar picture but this one is much more abstract.

You play James Savage who is currently in a three-story motel that just got a 46 story expansion all heading down, courtesy of his ex, Draculae. She's taking part in some sort of ritual that will end the world and has plenty of hostages. Whatever this ritual is doing is causing The Void to warp reality with trauma into a nightmarish thrill ride all the way to the bottom where they'll confront everything that made their relationship come to this.

All supernatural chaos aside their abusive relationship manages to feel very real in the little ways they interact and the voice acting helps this exponentially. It's clear to me the writer knows what this kind of relationship feels like. It's not afraid to poke fun at the melodrama of two ex lovers confronting each other either. These two characters the story revolves around are flawed and fleshed out and I really enjoyed them.

James' descent into this hellish motel feels incredible. Diving past ghouls, rolling through their slashes and slow mo blasting them in the head. Saving hostages in between brief bursts of violence and popping enough pain pills to kill himself 50 times over just to tank through The Void's horde of supernatural horrors. If you hold down the dive button you can stay on the floor until you're out of ammo and need to get up to reload. Like I said it's Max Payne. The one main tweak in the gameplay besides enemy variety is an instant kill stake that you get 5 of and break various pieces of furniture to get more. Break shit, kill people. That's the gameplay loop and god is it addicting.

Which brings me to the music. It's pulse pounding and intense in a way that feeds perfectly into the gameplay. Other times moody or relaxing but always experimental and playful. Any time a track with lyrics comes up feels like a treat. It's one of those total package things where the visuals, sound design, gameplay and music are all working together perfectly. The entire OST has me seriously considering getting the vinyl.

El Paso, Elsewhere is a must play. There's so much I didn't mention because I want you to unravel the rest of this one for yourself. I'll definitely be trying to 100% this in the future and it's safe to say I'll be replaying this for many years to come.

I think I love this game? It does have flaws, sometimes glaring ones, but the combat flows so well and the story really hit for me. This is definitely not a game for everyone, the early levels are pretty repetitive and it takes a little too long for the game to really find its footing, but once it gets going it really goes places. It tells a story about abuse and addiction in a way that I found refreshingly honest, if a little clumsily handled in one or two instances. Overall a great game to spend a couple afternoons on if you can muscle through the game's slow opening.

Played 2.1 hours, wish I had refunded on Steam a few minutes before.

The first Max Payne remains is my favorite PS2-era action game, I have had a passionate love affair with PC-first low budget indie games since Minecraft's original launch, due to the ability that format gives the developers to pursue unconventional ideas, and take the time necessary to adequately execute on a concept. The best of that format (Outer Wilds, Disco Elysium, The Case of the Golden Idol) offer novel, polished experiences that, outside of occasional Nintendo releases, we almost never see in the AAA or even AA space.

This game is not low-budget, it's cheap. The 2.1 hours I have spent with it feel more like 10, due to the grating, repetitive nature of the level design. There are a total of 2 repeat enemies so far, with single encounters with 2 others. Each of these has exactly one mode of attack, and is used in the same 2-3 ways throughout the levels. The levels themselves have so few assets, recycled so gratuitously, that they often feel like pre-alpha leaks. They do not build one another, offer twists or new obstacles, or even any particular strategic challenge in the combat. The 4, generic weapons so far are just as effective against each of the enemy types. The reason Max Payne's combat worked so well was that the slow-mo diving changes the approach to combat against ranged enemies a great deal. With these melee enemies, the slow-mo ability hardly makes a difference. It is a surface-level aesthetic imitation without a basic understanding of the foundations.

Even if the game has just one more level to go, I don't want to see it. Writing this review was more stimulating.

EVERYBODY PUT YOUR HANDS UP
CAUSE THIS ICE CREAM MAN'S GONNA INSTRUCT
EVERYBODY GOOD EVERY DAY'S A FUN DAY
WHEN YOU GOT YOURSELF A
hUmAn SuNdAe

A true spiritual successor to the first two Max Payne games.
It's earnest and sincere, surreal and haunting.
When it's serious and personal you feel the stakes, when it's goofy camp you laugh.
Presentation is mature and impactful, making ample use of lighting, framing and color.
The voice performances and writing deliver a lot with very little, both succinct and purposeful.
The hip-hop pounding guitar blaring soundtrack keeps. you. going. through a 6 hours-ish 50 chapter campaign that goes places.
You can modify the amount of damage you take and how much painkillers heal or turn on infinite ammo and painkillers for maximum fun or challenge, depending on what you want.

It's an easy recommend not only for any fan of Max Payne but any fan of over the top action.