El Hijo is a spaghetti-western stealth title by the Berlin-based indie studio Berlin-based Honig Studios.
It is a non-violent game, where you play a six year old searching for his mother in the Wild West. The teaser trailer below can give you a little bit more context on how the kid and his mother got separated.
Our story begins when bandits attack a farmer and her son El Hijo and burn down their house. Deciding not to fight back, the mother leaves El Hijo at a secluded monastery to protect him. But El Hijo isn’t going to stay put while his mother is in danger, and he escapes into the wilderness.
Since you’re playing as a six-year-old, combat is not really an option. Instead, you need to sneak past the many dangers of the frontier using the “mischievous, playfulness of a young child.”
Shadowplay is in the core of El Hijo and hiding in them is where the kid spends most of his time. However, the gameplay expands beyond just sneaking, as more variations of existing mechanics are introduced and combined to increase the challenge. These twists on familiar mechanics are often a product of the increasingly dangerous environments you must traverse to reach his ultimate goal.
The kid starts his quest in the remote monastery his mother leaves him at, but he once he escapes he reaches a harsh and unforgiving stretch of desert and a frontier town rife with crime.
El Hijo is coming to PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Switch in 2019.
