The past several months have been overwhelming and even if it were my full time job I think I would find it difficult to keep up with all of the current events. I'm a bit of a news junkie and I live in the DC metro area and I follow US national politics pretty closely there are multiple news events daily that would have been scandalous alone for any previous administration but because Washington moves so slowly there simply isn't time to respond before the next event. Today the headline that jumped out at me was that the US has killed 70+ Venezuelans over the last several months in these continued, almost daily attacks on Venezuelan fishing boats that the US claims are drug smugglers.
We're not at war with Venezuela. So this amounts to President Trump unliterally deciding that drug smuggling is punishable by execution without trial and while your head is still spinning from that you hear that we're building concentration camps for homeless people and so it goes, day after day.
So Dispatch kind of came out of nowhere didn't it? A surprisingly hilarious game from the folks who made The Wolf Among Us which I heard good things about but never played. I was in the mood for some Tell Tale Games style fun though so when it popped up in my feed for $30 bucks I grabbed it without even looking to see what kind of game it was which worked out really well because it's more of an interactive movie than a game but even that does it a disservice. It's very fun, and more than that it's extremely funny, heart warming, all the things that I needed in this moment where multiple cascading crises stack up on top of each other in a wave that threatens to overwhelm us all.
I think that an experience like this is best enjoyed completely blind, so while I won't be exposing any spoilers here, if that's the experience you want you should stop now and just go play. Trust me, it's great!
It's really hard to categorize Dispatch genre wise, I looked on their steam page and it says it's a "Super hero workplace comedy", and elsewhere I see, "Interactive Adventure and Strategy Game", I think both of those are appropriate descriptions, all of those elements exist in the game, but this game is so much more than the sum of it's parts that it really defies description.
I think the best way for me to describe it is to explain how I'm experiencing it.
I've mostly been playing with my wife and we've slotted into what would usually be a TV or movie watching timeslot which for us is later in the evening after the kids are in bed. Sometimes I play and she watches, other times we switch. The vast majority of the first four episodes are long exquisitely animated cutscenes with some optional quick time events thrown in to keep you on your toes.
There are also many scenes where you get to choose what a character, usually the main character, says or does. It is by far the most well done interactive TV I've ever seen and if the game was just this I think we already have an award winner on our hands. It's as good or better than most of the contemporary stuff on Netflix.
But, spliced into that RPG experience there's a strategy game where you play the eponymous Dispatcher and send your team of super heroes out on various missions around the town. An event, or multiple events pop up on your map and you have to decide who to send, and occasionally you'll have to deal with unexpected events and coach the team through them. It's mostly text and menu driven but the characters are all interacting with each other and the Dispatcher the whole time. It's pretty chill and fun.
Oh one last thing before I forget: I would say that it's "fun for the whole family" but the language and themes are definitely on the adult side so the kiddos will have to wait. I almost completely forgot there's full frontal (alien?) nudity in the first episode so yeah.
Great game though, go buy it so we can all get more.