hey guess what I played Dispatch
- mannyrosen1
- 7 hours ago
- 9 min read
Salutations, you callow twats! Happy Thanksgiving! It's been some time. Boy, boy, boy, has it been some time. I guess the president might've given another president some head back in the nineties or something. I don't think it's very likely, but a gal's gotta have a dream, and right now my dream is that the 2016 election was an elaborate eighties-high-school-movie-esque revenge story by a scorned and spiteful ex-lover against their fling's new type-A, careerist spouse. Like I really want Trump to show up to Congress dressed like Julia Roberts in the second half of Pretty Woman.
The whole ordeal reminds me of some important words uttered by a wise and empathetic political mind:
Anyways, so I bought Dispatch and then I played all of it. If you don't know what Dispatch is, it's a video game...kinda. Is it? It describes itself as a "superhero workplace comedy", which doesn't
sound like a video game. That sounds like a TV pitch that'd have Bob Iger shooting jizz out of his eye sockets.
It also mostly feels like a TV show. I played Dispatch for nine hours, and of that nine, I was probably only playing the game for four. It was developed by AdHoc Studio, a relatively new indie dev based here in LA. It was founded by a bunch of game dev veterans, namely a group of alumns from the now-defunct Telltale Games, and it really shows.
Before I keep going, don't let my caustic and teasing tone fool you; I really loved Dispatch. It's exciting, unique, inventive, genre-bending, funny, and...new. Really, really new. I don't know how else to explain what I mean by 'new', but that's the point of the blog post. So this game gets my full endorsement. Got it? Good.
Anyways, if you don't remember Telltale Games, they were a game dev that existed from 2004-2018 but is probably best known for making these decision-based episodic adventure games back in YouTube's Pewdiepie-pre-quasi-Fascist era. Back when we thought Smosh was funny, Tobuscus wasn't accused of rape yet, and I was in middle school.
They were these pretty-but-cheaply animated point and click adventure games made for licensed IPs. Examples include Jurassic Park, Guardians of the Galaxy, Minecraft Story Mode, and, most famously, The Walking Dead.
They were released episodically, and you could buy them one at a time or buy a whole season pass. The plot varied wildly (at least wildly before Witcher 3) based on your decisions, and at the end of every episode, the game would let you know how popular or unpopular your decision was compared to the rest of the player base.
It shouldn't be a surprise, then, that Telltale would shutter its developmental doors when that particular era of YouTube was over. Indeed, as the innocence and wonder of us elder zoomers' favorite Let's Players faded with their untouched criminal records and SkyDoesMinecraft's strange and brief music career, we graduated high school. Some of us were attending college in 2018 when Telltale shut down. Some of us were even dropping out.
Unlike Telltale's episodic releases, AdHoc released Dispatch in weekly two-episode chunks beginning in October and ending just ten days ago. Less like separate game releases and more like a season release of a TV show. Additionally, the whole thing's a single thirty-dollar purchase as opposed to the pay-by-episode optioning that Telltale offered.
You might be surprised to find out that when it first showed up on my Steam page, the algorithm couched it in my longstanding love of strategy and simulation games; look, sometimes, my Achilles-esque hubris can only be soothed by a crunchy Paradox title.
Dispatch is, by legal definition, a simulation game. As the title suggests, you play a superhero dispatcher named Robert. You manage a team of low-rent heroes for hire, all reformed villains now trying to tow a straight line and failing miserably.
Ironically, for a game developed by a team of people who nearly exclusively made IP-based products for a decade, the heroes of Dispatch feel exceedingly original without ever straying too far from form. Sonar is a literal bat man who also maintains a large crypto portfolio. Phenomoman, a Superman homage, has all of Superman's alien strength and ability while also being awkward and completely unrelatable.
Invisigal, one of two romance options, is manic-pixie-dream-bait for Rule 34, but that's okay! I'm getting more
and more okay with things just kinda being porn sometimes. There's a decently lengthy sex scene at the beginning of an episode that turns out to just be a dream, and is that necessary? No! But that's okay. More on that later.
So, like half the game you're doing as the title suggests, you're dispatching your team members around Los Angeles solving problems. You have to guess which of your team members would be good for which tasks kinda based on vibes alone, which I really like.
It's a heavily plot-driven game and forcing you to make decisions like that rewards you for investing in your characters in a way that's really inventive. It's also time-sensitive, so there's a nice mixture of strategizing and making split-second decisions based on reaction speed without getting bogged down by complicated mechanics.
The rest of it is more Telltale-like. It's basically episodes of a 2D/3D Netflix show ala Arcane but funnier and not being forced down my throat by every goddam nineteen-year-old I know. And, like a Telltale classic, there's a ton of decision making and branching dialogue trees, with your decisions at the end of each episode being shown to you in comparison with their popularity.
Before I get to the fucking point, here's a quick rundown of all the other stuff I really like about it:
The voice acting's stellar. They got Jesse fucking Pinkman to star in it, for Christ's Sake, and Matt Mercer's Shroud is honestly terrifying.
As someone who usually hates the squishy animal side character, I really like Beef, your dog. They make him vital to the story, both thematically and plot-wise.
The game's beautiful. I'm colorblind and even I was super impressed by the use of color here.
The music is banging. I don't know how much of it was original vs found, but tres magnifique.
I'll get to it more later, but I really like the way LA is portrayed. It really does know the best things about this place and showcases them lovingly...the culture, the climate, the diversity, the way the light hits buildings.
So, why's this all so exciting to me?
Because Dispatch is defiant. It is defiant in the idea that a player will watch a fifteen-minute cutscene without touching their controller simply out of investment in its characters. It's defiant that the superhero genre, in contradiction with all contrary evidence, isn't dead. One could argue, even, that the central conflict
with Shroud, a villain who sees human choice as futile and the future as optimizable, can be seen as commentary on the state of the genre, where the MCU treats fans as predictable, numerical blips, like leafcutter ants meant to bring leaf-cuttings of wealth to feed Bob Iger's vast egg cache being continually fertilized by Kevin Feige's-alright, this simile is getting gross.
Point is, there's a lot of things about Dispatch that seem to point towards the future--not just in video games and superheroes, but in storytelling. It's pointing to an erosion between mediums that's already been ongoing since film, tv, and video games have all become dominated by streaming. On the level of superheroes, it points to original characters local to their story rather than the megafaunic flagships invented in the 20th century.
It even points to the future of Los Angeles (told you I'd get there). From a production standpoint, the game was ostensibly published by tabletop actual play company Critical Role. While the big studios continue to crumble and major game companies continue churning out decade long triple-A behemoths, I think we're gonna continue seeing the mantle of medium-sized projects being taken up by new, alternative firms.
This includes Critical Role with Dispatch, Dropout with their new slew of standup specials, and A24 with their film releases. I'm sure there's a bunch that I'm missing. But what all these companies have in common is an unconventional corporate structure that allows for freer artistic creativity and better pay for the artists they work with. Many of them were immediately compliant with the recent union strikes and weren't set back in their production schedule because of it.
The game itself is set in fucking Torrance. Not in Beverly Hills. Not even in Silverlake. Torrance. Y'know, by the port. "Hollywood Elitism" might as well be its own word in the dictionary. LA has, for the past century, been a city of immigrants and working class people waiting for hours in traffic to clean the homes and school the children of an elite few. But times change. The elite are less elite, and for LA to have any real future, it needs to lower cost of living, increase public transit, and clear out the fucking traffic. Basically, purge its elitism and let Torrance tell a story now and again.
So, the point I made earlier about Invisigal? Well, I still picked her as my romance option. Ask any of my friends, none of them are gonna be surprised I went for a brown girl with a nose ring over Anne Hathaway's Wonder Woman.
But even if you're boring and go for if Fiona from Shrek just transformed into Cameron Diaz, the ultimate conflict Dispatch's story hinges on isn't between Robert and Shroud; it's between him and Invisigal. Is she actually capable of doing good in the world when, paraphrasing her words, her powers of invisibility are designed for deceit and subterfuge? Are her choices meaningful? Impactful? Even if she had the ability to control herself, can that make any real difference?
The last episode of Dispatch begins with an office worker in a big, squishy costume making cups of coffee for our heroes while Los Angeles burns around them. This is the central theme of the game; that all of us, no matter our position, can do something to help. Not everyone can be Superman, but everyone can make a cup of coffee. In the context of Hollywood production, this is even more pertinent.
If you actually go through the resumes of the team behind Dispatch, you'd find a lack of loyalty to medium. Writers have worked in video games, TV, comics. Voice actors are similarly arrayed. It should be no surprise, then, that the game similarly drifts between mediums and genres. It's the point of the joke I made earlier about porn--loyalty to medium usually stems from vested institutional interest, something that, as a young creative voice in Los Angeles just desperate to be heard, I know we are unlikely to have. Most of us don't work in creative positions; we're assistants, PAs, cameramen, extras. In this view of entertainment, there are no stars, just many hands in a single project's pot.
So, if you're a craftsman whose main concern is lighting, what does it matter if you're lighting a TV show or a porn shoot? Hollywood is known for its self-indulgent rules around genre and medium, which Dispatch doesn't have--a TV show can be a video game, a video game can be porn. In the end, the game is invested in story.
So, does Invisigal have true autonomy? The game thinks she does. It's obvious. It thinks we all do, literally we, because it constantly confronts us as players with choice. There are endings where Invisigal's unable to redeem herself, but that's due to your failings to bridge the gap as a mentor rather than the cosmic inability of humans to reverse fate.
Dispatch feels pertinent to the future because it cares a lot about the future. And, in a time of deepening cynicism and hopelessness, it uses the kitschiest, most blindingly hopeful genre to be unflinchingly, bravely and tirelessly optimistic. It sees a crumbling past giving way to a future that isn't only acceptable; it's actively better. And it's one where we all have the power to help.
preach