El Paso, Elsewhere is an early 2000s/very late 1990s third-person boomer shooter with Max Payne slow-mo diving and a level based structure. You get a bunch of guns that all feel good and the maps are pretty well designed too.

Then you have the aesthetic, which is this weird noir lo-fi vibe mixed with really good voice acting and great (if slightly campy at times cough cough the raps ) music. The story came across as a bit self-serious and borderline pretentious as first (but maybe a fun, intentional kind of pretentiousness?) but evolved into a really interesting/compelling story involving vampires I won't spoil.

The levels are pretty snappy, like 5-10 minutes apiece, and mowing down vampires and paranormal creatures is overall really fun. If I had one criticism, it's that 50 levels was a bit exhausting for the story they wanted to tell. I would have preferred the 30 best/most important ones carrying a more tightly-paced narrative with the less critical 20 being relegated to optional bonus levels you can unlock.

Ultimately, a super cool game that has put Strange Scaffold on the map for me as a studio to pay close attention to. I also wonder if this game could be a model for smaller devs making a 7-10 hour third-person action game campaign in the future. Really nifty!

(Review based on ~20 hours spent getting the true ending, did not do too much side stuff)

I admired Dragon's Dogma II more than I loved it. The parts that everyone says are great -- the silliness of your Pawns, the intelligent semi-autonomous behavior of your party, the unpredictability of encounters, the crawling on big monsters -- make for a game that is very fun and cool and largely unlike anything else out there.

Everything around the edges nearly sinks the game: Bad framerate (on a PS5), flimsy story and main questline, poor loot distribution (everything I have ever needed was in a shop), obscure quests with non-intuitive solutions, horrendous stamina, and relatively few enemy types. I might do a second playthrough someday (maybe when DLC comes out), but I left my time ready for it to be over. Is it cool? Yes. Do the pros outweigh the cons? I would argue they don't for most players I would recommend a game like this to.

It's fine? Very pretty and I admire any effort at making more Rhythm Heaven. The minigames are very hit and miss fun wise and I had to change the timing settings to be less strict because I found the default settings very annoying.

It took me months to get through this despite it being maybe 2 hours long if you take your time. It really struggled to pull me in.

I won't go lower than 3 stars because Melatonin is an admirable and competent package with some dreamy vibes, but overall I was left shrugging by the end of it.