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.
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.