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Interview

Attract Mode

We catch up with Berlin-based developer Honig Studios

to find out more about their stealth western, El Hijo

Interview

Attract Mode

“That plot is one of

many allusions to

the work of maverick

Chilean director

Alejandro Jodorowsky”

T

he most immediately

striking thing about El Hijo is

how boldly its theme goes

against the grain of a typical

sneak-’em-up. Where most

of the biggest stealth games tend to go for

military themes (Metal Gear, Splinter Cell)

or far-eastern settings (Tenchu, Shadow

Tactics), El Hijo is instead inspired by the

spaghetti westerns of director Sergio

Leone. Its protagonist, meanwhile, is far

from a hardened gun-slinger; following the

destruction of the

family homestead

by vicious bandits,

six-year-old El Hijo is

left in the safety of

a monastery by his

mother. Determined

to be reunited with

her – and track down the villains who

burned down his home – El Hijo decides to

escape from the monks’ care and traverse

miles of desolate and often dangerous

deserts and towns, with only his wits and a

tiny catapult to protect him.

That plot is one of many allusions to

the work of maverick Chilean director

Alejandro Jodorowsky – specifically, his

surreal 1970 western, El Topo, which

even features a kid named El Hijo who

is deposited at a neighbourhood

monastery. But where El Topo was

violent and often disturbing,

El Hijo is playful

and wonderfully

delicate in its

presentation: the monastery, where the

game begins, is all candlelight and long

shadows, as monks quietly sweep floors or

trudge up and down its gloomy hallways,

seemingly lost in thought.

As El Hijo threads his way through

the building, clinging to low walls or

hanging back in the shadows, he – and

by extension, the player – needs to find

ever more ingenious places to hide and

methods to avoid getting caught. When

we got our hands on the game earlier this

year, we constantly

found ourselves

smiling at the care

developer Honig

Studios have put

into its design and

animation: the

way El Hijo nimbly

ducks behind curtains, jumps into tubs

of water, or scuttles down the sides of a

crumbling building to the next hiding place.

Every frame of animation and background

element feels as though it’s been designed

and rendered with the utmost care.

These early scenes also help forge a

bond between the player and central

character; unlike, say, Solid Snake, or

Splinter Cell’s Sam Fisher, El Hijo can’t

exactly fight back if he’s cornered – once

spotted, the boy’s only choices are to

either run and find a shadowy place to

hide, or simply stand and get caught.

In the early areas we played through,

the monks are a fairly benign bunch, and

capture merely set us back a few paces

stealthy

in our hunt for freedom. Later, however,

outdoor areas provide fewer places to

duck, and marauding bandits only add to

the escalating sense of threat – El Hijo’s

catapult is handy for causing diversions

and solving the odd puzzle here and there,

but it’s far too feeble to be considered a

viable weapon.

El Hijo, then, is set to offer a refreshingly

different spin on an established genre:

in the place of stealthy kills or tension-

lowering bursts of action, it’s instead a

game of hide-and-seek, with each area

offering its own puzzle box of obstacles,

refuges, and opportunities for mischief.

With all this in mind, we tracked down

El Hijo’s creative director Maria Grau-

Stenzel to find out more about the game’s

development, and the thinking behind its

likeably diminutive hero.

The good, the bad, and the

 El Hijo’s creative producer,

Maria Grau-Stenzel.