El Paso, Elsewhere is beautifully simple. It’s a third-person action game in which you fire guns and dive through windows, triggering bullet-time as you whittle down ranks of converging foes. Its levels are labyrinthine, its hunger for carnage is nearly endless. It’s a thrilling challenge at the standard difficulty and thoroughly cathartic if you drop down the damage you receive, set the ammo to infinite, and just thrash away in the abyss. All of this, yes, but what’s special about El Paso is how it’s been dressed up.
El Paso, Elsewhere reviewPublisher: Strange ScaffoldDeveloper: Strange ScaffoldPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out today on PC, Xbox One and Xbox X/S.
It comes in layers. A noir hero in a trenchcoat enters a motel and rides the elevator down to hell, stopping at every level along the way. Twin pistols, blocky outlines, fizzing, flickering shadows: at first it feels like a Stranglehold PS1 demake. The character models have the odd silhouettes and triangle noses of early Tomb Raider, while muzzle-flashes are lovingly ragged and pixelated at the edges. Environments have walls and floor and – most often – no ceiling, revealing a twisting Llamasoft sky, while each stage has the twisty-turny relentlessness of a great Doom level.
But there’s more to it, still. The logo, with its bold font and emergency-services yellow suggests Lost Highway era Lynch, and he would certainly make the most of that cage lift you ride around in. But there’s something deeper and more rarified in its pulpy strangeness here. El Paso, I decided after a few hours, really reminds me of Repo Man-era Alex Cox. It’s witty and also kind of serious. It’s shlock, but strikingly so. It’s Americana but someone’s taken a step back to reveal the domestic oddness of it all. And then it goes wild.
Objectives are simple enough. You appear in a level, race around fighting off shambling monsters and rescuing innocents, whose locations are highlighted by tubes of light which you can generally see because there are no ceilings.
You can see where they are, sure, but getting to them is another matter. That’s because the levels are warrenous and elbowy, in love with the backtrack and the dead end, and that’s before the walls start moving around. Get the innocents, or just work your way through the scrum, collecting coloured hearts to unlock coloured doors – it’s Alex Cox’s Stranglehold and a killer Doom mod, but it’s also Gauntlet? – and then when you’ve done enough damage or saved enough souls, you have to beat it to the exit where elevators, as the poet says, drop us from our day.