Wow what a break from any kind of games that was! But there could really be no better reason, Catrena and I got married! I’m not going to get too deep into now but planning a wedding really took a lot of my time, focus and creative energy! So much so that I neglected my website. But a good website isn’t something that has any feelings or knows when its being used too much or too little. It should stand like a lighthouse; looking stoic when dormant and lighting up to guide the way when needed.

And now that we’re post wedding, recovering from what I can only describe as the greatest weekend of all time, I decided to bust out the Steamdeck and give Catrena and I a little R&R with a brand new adventure game from the team that made The Wolf Among Us, now under the the moniker AdHoc Studio; Dispatch.

This kind of “choose your own adventure” game is one of our favorites to play together. We’ve played through some Dark Picture Anthology games (I guess not since I’ve launched this website), we’ve also played through Until Dawn and the Quarry and have a great time doing it. Dispatch won’t have the same scares as those, but from my experience with the Wolf Among Us, it’ll give us that good narrative.

I am writing this post credits on the final chapter. We’ve put a late night and early morning into finishing and it was well worth it! The first thing I noticed is the writing is excellent. It has a lot of heart and while there a fair number of tropes at play, it still felt a fresh perspective. The story is another behind-the-cape super hero epic that shows you the inner workings and relationships of your everyday superhero. The writing is good - it’s crass and potty-mouthed for sure, but it also builds some good characters and relationships. I particularly like Chase - voiced by Jeffrey Wright - the now-aged, super fast Star Blazer that did not realize he was advancing his aging while moving at the speed of light. He does fall into some stereotypes but his performance and story are pretty great.

There are other great performances here as well, which is why the lows in acting feel very low. It felt as though they used the idea of internet personalities as a form of viral marketing and while this is obviously preferable to using AI, when journalists and streamers without VA chops are acting next to the creme-de-la-creme of voice acting (Laura Bailey, Matthew Mercer, Travis Willingham) and Hollywood stars (Aaron Paul, Jeffrey Wright), the disparity was apparent. And not just in the way they acted, but also in possibly how it was recorded. The voice acting for Malevola felt like it was recorded in an Applebees - I found her extremely hard to understand and it wasn’t until well into the story did I even know they were foreign (Australia, I believe). But then at the same time Jacksepticeye did EXCELLENT as Punch-Up man, but perhaps they were not necessarily acting and were actually used to punching a bunch of dicks in bar fights.

The Game

On to the meat of why we’re here- the game itself. Outside of the dialogue choices there are quicktime events that feel completely inconsequential. So much so they give you the option of shutting them off completely. Me being a freak for cool QTEs kept them on but the next play through I’ll shut em off because they don’t really feel like they contribute anything to the story. I will need to check to see if there are any achievements linked to them but they feel kind of secondary - just around to make it feel more like a game.

Outside of dialogue, beyond quicktime events, nestled in between fight scenes, romances and tecno-jargin lives the part of this game that is going to keep me coming back for more… it’s The Dispatch of it all. As if AdHoc pilfered a new minigame from a Yakuza series, the team management mode of sending out super heroes on calls to help out subscribing citizens is an absolute joy to play.

The Dispatch

Here’s the breakdown. You have a roster of superheroes - who is on that roster depends on the choices you make - these heroes (and yes I know they aren’t heroes, they are villains that you are trying to rehabilitate but for the sake of discussion) each have special abilities and a 5-point graph of skills. You can pump these skills up with points earned by leveling. There is a big map of Torrance, CA where various events will pop-up; a problem will be described and a client will be issued. You need to decipher the highlighted key words that correlate to the various skills (intelligence, charisma, strength, speed and defense/vigor). Choose the right combo of heroes to tackle the specific problems. Each task takes a set amount of time, there is travel time and from the task as well as cooldowns for the specific heroes that have been sent out - each hero will have a specific rest period. It’s a brilliant time management game that lets you tune your heroes how you see fit while also occasionally mixing up the formula. Some characters will have abilities that let you add heroes to tasks, mental health plays a factor as does the morale of your team and whom they work well with. It’s literally the best Yakuza minigame ever made… okay maybe not better than Yakuza’s Cabaret Grand Prix but it’s damn close!

Another high point for me was the way the skill graph would also double as skill checks. By sending more than one hero out on a task your skill graph would combine and their skills would multiply. Depending on the task, there can be an interruption that would require additional intervention and with that… skill checks! If, say, you were trying to figure out which class to compete in a local LARP as, you could deduce that the BARD class would require high charisma… and you would be correct! Choose bard and you would have to meet or match a skill check in order to successfully complete that task. All these variations kept this minigame feel so fun and fresh that I’m upset there is not some kind of infinite mode where I can just answer tasks until I got sick of it.

Any complaints about this mini game are all leveraged towards quality of life. Occassionally it’s hard to select the correct event on the map. When there are a half dozen icons that need your attention it can be troublesome navigating through them all and it caused me to miss answering a call. Navigating through the character menu to do upgrades is clumsy. I sometimes sent heroes out on tasks without confirming all members causing me to fail due to lack of skills. But these are small things that would sometimes just add to a bit of the chaos of managing the time. And it can get chaotic!

Hack the Planet

One additional layer to this game is a new and improved hacking minigame. No longer will Pipe Dream be the gold standard for hacking mini games, Dispatch is ready to take it’s seat among games like Fallout 3 and NieR: Automata for introducing a new kind of hacking game into the mix.¹ When it’s time to hack you get transported into a top-down grid and need to navigate to various points which have you input the correct sequence of directional inputs. These input could be right there for you to follow or they could be broken up and hidden around the map. There are enemies to dodge, puzzles to solve, lots of little variations and tricks that keep this feeling fresh through to the end of the game. I enjoyed most of the hacking; there is one task that asks you to “match a frequency” and you have to find the specific spot on the map that has the same waveform and it felt like it rarely worked.

The City Where We’re From

Before starting this neither I nor Catrena knew it was set in the very real city of Los Angeles which is where we live! It was also obviously made by people who live here because there are some very fun little jokes about LA peppered in, including the very big joke of setting the Z Team’s stomping grounds in Torrance. While I wouldn’t say Dispatch is a love letter to Los Angeles, it’s certainly a clever post card saying “wish you were here.”

The Path We Chose

Yes, I love Invisigal. Yes, she’s the perfect wounded bird and her sex dream scene was a surprise that also made her more of a favorite… but we still chose the Blonde Blazer for our first time. I actually thought she was going to turn out to be evil but we stuck with her! Now that we know how that part of the story played out we’ll go back and try to keep Invisigal on the straight and narrow and see if we can get some romance happening. This is the fun of these games! When you get to the end and the characters are well written, it makes you want to go back and spend MORE time with them. And if they do their job (the developers, that is) you get to spend NEW time with them as well. I have no doubt that Dispatch will be fun to replay again. We’ll go through at least one more time and when we do I’ll update our findings.