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.
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.