As 2023 finally comes to a close, and we look back over all of the lovely gaming goodies we've been treated to over the past 12 months, it'd be easy to just auto-focus in on the AAA stuff, your big budget fare and returning famous franchises. I'm talking about the Alan Wakes here, the Starfields, Baldur's Gates and Diablos, y'know the real shiny stuff we've been eagerly awaiting for aeons.
However, as we prepare to spend the next few weeks filling our tired bodies with dead animal flesh and ethanol whilst gaming hard, there is one 2023 release I urge you to consider making some time for during your festive break. Yep, Strange Scaffold's El Paso, Elsewhere sorta just sneaked outta the shadows in September of this year and seduced me entirely with its slick bullet-time shooter action, top-notch writing and wonderfully off-kilter vibes. I seriously couldn't stop playing this game for a few weeks, late nights, multiple replays, the whole thing.
Think old school Max Payne spliced with Hotline Miami and you've got a sense of the vibe here. This is a game jam-packed full of incredibly moreish slo-mo bullet ballets that take place across enclosed levels, creating an immediate sense of urgency and tension. There's a nerve-shredding lack of space at times, really, with fast-moving enemies creating a very real need to plan your moves, learn your lessons from each death and go again, diving into the mix once more as you take out nightmarish ghouls who can zero in on your position surprisingly quickly once they have your scent.
Each short mission here is a puzzle of sorts, a bloody little conundrum where you need to use your bullet-time and dodging skills to survive the vamps who stand between you and the next exit. You can break furniture to make stakes, a great way to one shot enemies and whittle down numbers as you carefully move forward, slo-mo dive to add extra damage to shots and slow the entire world down to pick and choose who dies next.
You better believe your health runs out fast here too, there's no magic regeneration of that green bar either - luckily you've got pills to pop to help you out there - your slo-mo gauge needs to be used sparingly, and all of this fun just happens to look fantastically stylish and sound amazing to boot.
Indeed, of all the big budget spectaculars and smaller indie efforts we've played this year, El Paso, Elsewhere is instantly recognisable as an experience you can just tell has had a lot of love and time and effort and thought poured into it. The flow of the core action here is supremely slick, controls are on point, and no matter how many times I died (millions), it always felt like the sticky ends (not like that) were 100% the result of my mistakes. Sign of a banger!
Also, can I just say - and you'd be surprised how much this one memory affected me feeling the need to write this soapbox - the music in this game is DELICIOUS. It's one of the soundtracks of the year, seriously, and the first time it drops in battle...oh lord...when that beat kicks in, in that one magic moment early doors in the game, you know you're in safe hands.
Stylish, slick and incredibly addictive then, but we've also got a surprisingly affecting narrative here too, a delightfully atmospheric vampire love story to see through. It's supremely well-written stuff, the constant narration nails the hugely exaggerated hard-boiled detective style it's going for, and the devs have made sure to throw in lots of nods and winks as they playfully tool around with how they lay out levels - doors and windows dotted nonsensically around just so you can dive or crash through them.
Indeed, this is an adventure that revels in its inherent gaminess, serving up weirdly warped geometry, toying with how we expect environs to unfurl as we plunge downwards through multiple floors of hardcore carnage. If you find yourself drawing up a plan of games to dig into over this holiday, I highly recommend sticking El Paso on there. An action/horror experience that'll stay with you for a good long while after you've seen it through, and it'll only take you around six or seven hours to do so, this is easily one of my absolute fave indies of 2023 - which is saying something - and a game I've found myself recommending to everyone recently. So stick that in your turkey and roast it!