I can't stop thinking about the themes of El Paso, Elsewhere.
Themes of addiction and abuse are very common. Themes of "you can always try to be better" are very good, but also done before. But this game intertwines them so deeply that they're effectively one theme, and pulls them together absolutely fucking perfectly in the end.
James Savage is a drug addict. He's mostly only able to DO this massive "save the world" mission because he's on enough painkillers to euthanize an elephant. In one of the cutscenes, he reminisces about one of two Really Good Days he had. He's in recovery, and just picked up his three month chip, and he's going out to celebrate with his sponsor. While they're out, she says that if he ever loses it, they always have more.
James Savage ruminates about the difference between living good and dying good. How dying good is easy, so easy even someone like him can do it. You "bleed your goodness onto the universal ledger," and that's it. Living good is hard, it's a choice you have to make, endless choices, over and over, every single day. "It's like chiseling your soul into a new shape. And it's fucking slow." And then:
I don't know if you've ever been on a wagon, but falling off -- it feels like tumbling down a well. There's just... water, and walls, worn completely smooth. It feels like you've lost the ability to be a different person again. So you go from 3 months between relapses to two days. One day. And Pearl said that was okay. As long as I kept coming back for that chip again. Because they always had more.
James Savage explicitly refers to you, the player, as the tiny fraction of him that believes that he's going to do this, that he's actually going to follow up on his plan to save the world instead of just giving up before even starting.
James Savage used to date Draculae, Lord of the Vampires.
Draculae is an abuser. She never physically hurt him, but she made sure that he knew that she could, punching holes through brick walls right in front of him. Breaking all of the dishes because "he made her do it. Refusing to speak to him for multiple days, and if he couldn't tell why, she couldn't help him. Telling him to stay where he was, sitting on the couch, and then only returning four days later, covered in blood. An incident she refers to as an "outlier" as if that makes it excusable.
Draculae thinks James hates her "for... what you feel I did to you."
Draculae is also not a monster.
James says as much. He doesn't feel bad when he kills monsters. Killing her would feel different.
Because Draculae was not always abusive.
James mentions two "really good days" throughout the game. One of them I already mentioned, is brought up much later in the game. Early in the game, he speaks about the first, the day he realized he loved her. They'd spent the day together, and they were on a ferris wheel, and as it rose to the top, she rested her head on his shoulder, and whispered "I forgot living could be a good thing."
Draculae was trying to be good. The first time she came home covered in blood after draining someone, she was in his arms, sobbing and apologizing and asking if she was a monster. James reassures her that humans make mistakes, and supernatural or not, she's still human.
Draculae cried less the second time. The third time, she mentioned how upset she was with herself, and after that it simply didn't get brought up.
When you die in the game, instead of the game saying "you died", it says in big block capitals "YOU KEEP GOING" and immediately reloads the checkpoint. When you go to quit the game, the confirm quit dialogue changes each time, and it's always something about either giving up or choosing to continue in spite of the challenges.
In the final boss fight, after you wear down Draculae's health bar, a second phase begins. With the same stylized block capitals saying "SHE KEEPS GOING."
When you defeat her, she lies on the ground as James sits beside, both of them bleeding out from their injuries. She dies first, and James says this:
She was just a hurt person who did fucked up things, until it became easier to define herself by the people she damaged, than to change.
She only became an abuser because it became easier to define herself by that than to stop hurting people. She fell off the wagon, and it was too easy to just assume she couldn't be a better person. That that was just who she was.
There are two endings to the game, "Scars Fade" and "Thanks for Believing" depending on how many of Draculae's sacrifices/hostages die.
Scars Fade culminates with Draculae giving James some of her "soulsblood," the thing that turns a human to a vampire, so that he can have the opportunity to turn cruel and lonely like she was. James ponders for a moment, then decides to take it. Wounds heal, scars fade, and he knows that, even if he falters, he always has the chance to get back on the wagon and be better, again.
Thanks for Believing culimates with Draculae breaking the vial of her soulsblood out of spite, choosing to make him die with her. And, as he bleeds out from his wounds in the lobby of the motel, he thanks you for believing.
In either case, one of the last things he says, is "I'm ten minutes sober."
And I cannot stop thinking about it. It's one of those things that carries so much obvious meaning it's hard to unpack without sounding simultaneously like a conspiracy theorist and an idiot.
A game that draws direct parallels between the recovery process of accepting that sometimes you'll falter but you can always try again, and the larger endeavor of being a good person, where it's less important that you are always a good person and never do anything bad, and more important that you keep trying to be good. Living good is a process, a series of decisions you have to make every day. And James Savage is ten minutes sober.
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