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.

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

There's so much of me that wants to give this game a higher score than I did. El Paso, Elsewhere has so much going for it in its atmosphere and its insanely well-written story. However, its gameplay doesn't hold up to the same level of quality, leaving it to stick out like a sore thumb.

It's less that the gameplay is outright bad because it's not. It does enough to carry you from point A to point B, but that's it. It features all the tools that make third-person shooters like it great, but rarely knows how to use those tools to the fullest effect.

The kryptonite to that is the difficulty, which only rarely provides any sense of challenge. The few glimpses of it feel incredible, but 95% of the time you'll never find a reason to use half the weapon roster, let alone the iconic slowdown mechanic of games like Max Payne.

I'd say this is still more than worth picking up for its incredible story alone, but you should be aware of what you're getting into. You need to be ready for the story and atmosphere to pretty much carry the game on its shoulders.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

There's a decent Max Payne homage here, but it's buried beneath a game that doesn't know when to stop. The level designs, enemy roster and weak gunplay (the shotgun being the exception) aren't enough to keep the game feeling fresh through its 50 levels.
The narrative is so self-indulgent in its drowsy mood that it becomes hard to care about any points it might try to make about the abusive relationships and vicious cycles the characters go through. A shame the trippy visuals and cool soundtrack can't pick up the slack, either.
There's an ok game here if played in short bursts, but it just doesn't come together in the end.

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.

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

Let’s get this out of the way: El Paso, Elsewhere is the least weird Strange Scaffold game yet, and as far as I’m concerned, their games’ weirdness is directly proportional to their value. In terms of gameplay, El Paso, Elsewhere is Max Payne with too many parts, a series of recycled combat encounters within a handful of very dark, mostly non-descript levels. Strange Scaffold stole Max Payne’s gunplay, its attitude, its ‘healing item as addictive drug’ mechanic – hell, it even steals the level intro ‘BOOM LEVEL NAME’ thing from Control, another Remedy game – but, bizarrely, leaves behind the chatty NPCs, the non-combat sections that made those games’ pacing work, and the conspiratorial stuff that drove the plot forward. To try and remake a Max Payne game without these things would be like stealing McDonald’s recipe for hamburgers but leaving out the bun and the toppings.

What El Paso, Elsewhere really is, is a mumblecore take on Max Payne with vampires. The game’s narratorial voice is less Raymond Chandler and more Mark Duplass. Gone are Sam Lake’s flowery, gloriously tacky monologues about fallen angels and fear giving men wings, replaced instead by whispery, whispy dialogue in which no two characters ever finish a line of dialogue because they’re always too busy nervously cutting one another off. All of this is underscored by a soundtrack which sometimes bites off more than it can chew, particularly on the tracks which feature vocals, which – I don’t know how else to put this, but it all sounds a whole lot like two people trying to recreate Death Grips tracks from over a decade ago, which is fine, but this was ultimately a miss for me.

So far, Strange Scaffold have proven to be at their best at executing on high concept stuff. The higher the concept, the better. An Airport for Aliens Currently Run By Dogs? Fine! A perfectly fun, surreal little experience. Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator? Perfect, extremely cool and strange, a thoughtful criticism of capitalist exchange expressed beautifully through game mechanics. The studio have proven they can do a whole hell of a lot – romantic drama, as it turns out, is not one of them.