El Paso, Elsewhere Wears Its Bloodstained Heartbreak on Its Sleeve

30.09.2023 - 17:03 / ign.com / Xalavier Nelson-Junior

There’s a moment at the very beginning of El Paso, Elsewhere, where the protagonist James Savage leans over the hood of a car pulled over in the middle of nowhere and makes a plea directly to the player. “I need you to believe…that I’m going to get back into this car, on the count of three, and stop my ex before she destroys us all. I need to know that you believe, so I can too.” He slowly counts to three, and in a blink, he’s in the El Paso hotel where she lies in wait. “Well,” he says, as if pleasantly surprised. “Here’s to believing.”

The parallels between this specific moment of James’ opening monologue and the story told to me by Strange Scaffold studio head Xalavier Nelson Jr. of the game’s development aren’t lost on me. He’s worked on over 80 projects in the past eight years, he tells me over a video call, across video games, comics, and tabletop, AAA and indie, licensed and original IP. His studio, Strange Scaffold, was founded out of a “deep passion for advocating to make games better, faster, cheaper, and healthier because our players deserve it.” As he speaks to me, Nelson walks Aristotelian laps around the brightly-painted living room, kitchen, and hallway of his house. Occasionally, he sprints to the PC to check a fact, then resumes his peripateticism.

I’ve interviewed Nelson before about his move from writing to every other aspect of game development, and his game-making philosophy centered around sustainability, broad collaboration, and deep introspection. When we last spoke on these subjects, it was about An Airport for Aliens Currently Run by Dogs – an extremely different kind of video game. And yet, not at all different. Both games center protagonists who are deeply in love, deeply hurt by it, and who spend a lot of time thinking about those feelings. Both games take place in colorful, almost surreal environments – albeit very different flavors of surreal. And both games are made with a distinct earnestness and sincerity that’s almost overpowering.

Two very different games, yes, but with the same heart. It’s intentional, Nelson says, and reflective across all of Strange Scaffold’s manifold projects. Wildly different swings all, but with the intent of cultivating a community that sticks around for their shared core of sincerity and introspection. That’s the Strange Scaffold portfolio strategy, but it almost destroyed them, for a lack of believing.

“So September 26th is when the game is supposed to come out, and we were going to run out of practically all of the money on October 1st,” he says. “I [started] to interact with the corporate and investment sectors of the games industry and they tell me, ‘You can't make games like this.’ And I'm like, ‘Well, we're doing it now. We do it over and