Reviews from

in the past


+ A little gem of a stealth game with a gorgeous world and character design, AI a bit off in places but the game more than makes up for that with it's charm
- Only knocked off a star as game crashed on the final level and corrupted my save file meaning I had to replay it again from scratch to achieve the platinum trophy. Would recommend backing up your save just in case.

Pulling a Trophy Hunting Pro Gamer Move™ getting this game's Platinum mere hours before it left the PS Plus service when I rarely play stealth games was An Experience, let me tell you. I am now fully acquainted with the finicky 100% requirements of El Hijo, whether I like it or not.

First, the positives. The art, level design, art direction, and music are all just incredible. The way this game looked was what pulled me in and caused me to make my dumb "hmm perhaps I shall complete this before it leaves the service" decision after all. There's a very consistent spaghetti western meets late 2010's animated TV show visual aesthetic throughout the entire game, where it oozes atmosphere and charm in every stitch. It's a gorgeous game, and the choices in color with the lighting and the uses of yellows and blues are simply stellar.

El Hijo's world and story unfolds entirely without dialogue, and to El Hijo's credit, this works. Once the mom leaves her child at a monastery so that she can go extract Wild West Revenge on the bandits who destroyed her home without her boyson catching a bullet between the eyes, El Hijo of course escapes and we get a steady reveal that the monastery isn't actually the safe haven that El Hijo's mom thought it would be and that it's, in reality, actually a weird front for corpse experimentation, weapons manufacturing, and child slavery. ("Whoops!") Then you get to see mom and son's paths converge as the levels progress and it accumulates with every bad guy in the game joining forces in a weird tag team of monks and outlaws before a plucky kid and his slingshot takes them all down. The story is simple and kid-friendly, but it's executed pretty well, and you even get a cute "Kid Power" ending where the enslaved children join forces and fight off the big, mean adults.

And then there's the gameplay...

There are many indie games where the art style and presentation are so much cooler than actually playing the game. Style over substance, the common complaint of cool-looking first releases by new, small studios. El Hijo is sadly one of them.

This is an exploratory stealth game, and this game's brand of stealth is completely nonviolent and focused on finding the one optimal route in a given level. You cannot take down enemies for good, you can only temporarily slow them down. At first, Little Sonboy must use shadows to sneak past the guards and throw rocks to create diversions, but eventually you unlock more weapons like a smoke bomb made out of cactus pollen and fireworks to stun enemies. On the one hand, I liked the feeling of progression and watching Little Boyson become More Sneaky™, but as a result, the last 1/4th of the game where you have access to the fireworks just feels funner to play because now you have more sneaking options than just "wait in one place until guard walks past your hiding spot".

Sadly, that was a big problem I had with El Hijo. The part of the game where you're in the monastery and feel the most defenseless is also the slowest and longest part of the game, and it's also the part of the game that highlights how brainless the AI can be. As long as Tiny Boykid is in the shadows, he can stand literally inches in front of guards without any worry. Monks are apparently nightblind, despite working in complete darkness being Their Thing. But then, the moment a guard does notices you, this instantly reverses and it's almost always an instant checkpoint restart since they are near impossible to evade as they turn into the goddamn Terminator to take you down. It's doable, but enemies run twice as fast as El Hijo and can be strangely persistent, often phasing through cracks in the wall or pushing past boundaries you swore were impassible. I swear I saw a monastery monk phase through a wall in order to catch me.

I was browsing through the Steam reviews and apparently the controls were worse in a previous release of a game. I can't even imagine how that felt, because the finicky, imprecise controls - in a game where you have to make split-second decisions - are what end up killing me the most. Little Sonboy's stealth controls are all Context Sensitive, giving you the option to crouch or hide when you bump into objects that give you the appropriate stealthing prompt. The game does not give you these prompts instantaneously when you touch a place of cover AND has a tendency to read multiple button prompts at once, meaning that Wee Childman will dive in and out of cover on accident and get caught because you happened to panic a little at an approaching guard.

There's also a bonus objective for Inspiring the various children you find, often locked in chains and forced to do slave labor off the beaten path, scattered throughout the various levels. I get what they're going for with El Hijo's silly antics bringing cheer to these hopeless kids - and sometimes El Hijo DOES save them so that they can move a ladder within reach - but some of these children were placed in very dire places like chained on a desert cliff baking in the sun or forced to build a bridge underneath the supervision of heavily armed soldiers that made me go "hey El Hijo, this kid's gonna die, I don't think the juggling act's gonna cut it this time".

All the kids you save end up showing up in the Epilogue so they supposedly all make it just fine. I still have my doubts about the second kid in Level 12 - The Monastery Station.

But, despite my gripes about the stealth (of which I had many), the aesthetics of the game and that feeling of power I got once I got the cooler weapons were enough to make me Platinum the game. El Hijo had some of the most frustrating moments I've had in a video game all year, but you know what? I saved all the children and got my farm and mom back.

Would I do it all again? Prrrobably not to 100%. But there's definitely Something Here to this game that probably could've been something great if the controls were hammered out more. There's better stealth games out there but El Hijo has HEART. And a slingshot that's kinda hard to target and often won't hit the object you were aiming for.

A game with pretty basic mechanincs, but also heart.

Didn't do much for me as it seemes to have been aimed more towards kids, but that doesn't excuse the issues with unresponsive controls and poor mouse support.

Gorgeous, charming, sorta straightforward stealth game. Non-violent fwiw.


👾 El Hijo - A Wild West Tale (🇩🇪 2020)

Amusing stealth-puzzle game about a son trying to reunite with his mother. Cozy vibes, lovely art style and simple gameplay. Nothing much to add.

🎮 Played on Steam Deck

Rating: 🌵🌵🌵🏜️▫️

The idea of producing a stylish and simplified version of Desperados to introduce kids to real time tactics games is very intriguing, though one must wonder which kids would have the patience to deal with this game's many whims and annoyances.

In it you take control of a little boy on his quest to rejoin his mother after their farm is destroyed and she entrusts him to an abbey of monks so she can go mete justice on those responsible. Little does she know that the monks are a front for some kind of child-enslaving racket/religious cult, whose clutches the son will have to escape, armed only with a slingshot and a bag of tricks to distract and sneak past his enemies.

Regardless of how gorgeous the art style is (especially during the cutscenes) and how effective the wordless environmental storytelling, there is simply no looking past the fact that the controls just don't work the way they should: when a split second reaction is what separates success from failure, the game ignoring your button press to make the character crouch behind something or slide under a table is simply inexcusable, leading to many, many undeserved deaths.

There is also the fact that the slingshot targeting display does not play nice with the angle of the game's fixed camera, often making it fiddly and difficult to hit what you are gunning for, which, when speed if a factor, can result in a string of frustrating restarts.

It doesn't help that the game suffers from the staple of most low quality stealth games: being spotted pretty much equals a checkpoint restart, since evading the enemies is more or less impossible. It is techically doable, but it requires breaking line of sight for longer than their suprehuman speed and tracking abilities usually allow. At the very least checkpoints are generously placed and can be activated multiple times to save one's progress, mitigating the aggravation.

Levels always boil down to going from A to B, avoiding cones of visions and altering the scenery to clear the way. As an optional activity there also are children to rescue from their captors, although, in pure modern gaming style, they serve no purpose other than unlocking achievements, as well as some inconsequential concept art. Tying their rescue to upgrades for your character or the availablity of a secret level would have gone a long way towards making the mechanic worthwhile: as it stands, it's anything but.

A couple of the 29 stages that compose the game see you taking control of the mother, and ironically these is the most fun content on offer, since she is faster, more agile, and armed with better equipment, which is refreshing compared to the oimited ability of the small boy. One train level in particular is the high point of the game. Sadly, these moments are few and far between.

There is an interesting mystery surrounding the religious cult, one which I swas hoping would be unraveled as the game went on, but it is unfortunately never expanded upon in any satisfying manner.

There was potential in El Hijo, but unfortunately the game design just isn't up to snuff.

By the end of El Hijo, my enjoyment of its level design and creativity had won out over my disappointment in its Switch performance and loading times. The mechanics here will be familiar to those who've played Desperados III or Mark of the Ninja, but El Hijo distinguishes itself with the way it has players using the environment to avoid detection. Each level seems to introduce some new idea and mechanic, and none of them outstay their welcome.

[GERMAN]

Schöner kleiner Taktik-Schleich-Knobler, den man fast schon bildlich als kleinen Bruder der DESPERADOS bezeichnen kann, präsentiert in kindgerechter Knubbelgrafik und auf der Tonspur weht ein Hauch von Morricone. Der namensgebendene Hauptcharakter schickt zur Abwechslung dann und wann auch mal die Mutter ins Feld. Obwohl man mit ihr fast das gleiche Gameplay erlebt, wirken die nun möglichen Ablenkmanöver ein bisschen weniger eingeschränkt und die Abschnitte dementsprechend ein bisschen lockerer und actionbetonter, was der Abwechslung gut tat.

Da ich zusätzlich zum Levelende auch immer alle Kinder befreien (bzw. spielintern als "motivieren" bezeichnet) wollte, hat sich leider das Pacing des Spiel ein wenig ins Negative geschoben. Letztlich kam ich mit knapp 8½ Stunden über die Ziellinie; HowLongToBeat.com sagt, dass das Ende nach knapp 5½ erreicht sein soll... Außerdem bin ich 'ne gute handvoll Mal an Ecken und Kanten hängengeblieben (Stichwort: "Irrgarten", ziemlich zu Anfang des Spiels), so dass ich dachte, dass der Weg, den ich eigentlich gehen wollte, nicht der Richtige ist.

Falls man auf solche Spiele steht, möchte ich dennoch eine Empfehlung da lassen... wenn's im Angebot ist.