Beat
Dispatch last night, it's great. I will note that I would have liked more of the actual dispatching part of the game, but it's a Telltale game at heart and all the characters were wonderfully written. And such great animation! Seriously I would really enjoy it if they made an Endless mode of the dispatching part, I know it wouldn't be easy and wouldn't have all the voiceover the in-game ones do but man that'd be fun.
Lumber and I played it together at the pace of about an episode a night and trading off who controls, and after every episode talked about the choices. I want to replay it just to see how other choices play out.
I picked up and played this game over the weekend.
On the one hand, I think while playing it, it was very easy for me to lapse into cynicism. I predicted the vast majority of twists in the game just based on structural clues to the game. For example:
the moment they introduced a speedster whose speeding also accelerated their aging, and they had to stop using their powers completely because it might cause a heart attack -- I knew for sure that character would be pushed into a situation where they had to go for one last heroic run. And also every single design choice about this game seems like it was scientifically designed around appealing to chud gamer bros, or at least feasting on their subconscious biases.
And yet, I was still pretty taken in by just about everything the game did. The characters are compelling and very well acted. The design sensibilities and style are oozing out of every corner of the game. The soundtrack is like audio catnip for me. Just a real fun, chill way to spend 8 hrs. There are just very well considered moments all over this game, like all of the little environmental storytelling moments where the UI helps tell the story in subtle ways. And at the core of everything, there's an earnest emotional core that's feels refreshing and lacking in a lot of corporate super hero media. I look forward to whatever this team does going forward, and it'll be interesting to watch this property specifically blossom from here as well.
Edit: Something I'd be remiss in not mentioning is how much I enjoyed this game's moral core. A lot of choose-your-own-adventure games like this, that allow you to do bad things, try to present morality as a grey, dirty thing. But this is a story about being a hero at its core, and even though the game lets you make poor decisions, it doesn't shy away from admonishing the player for it and maintaining its moral core. For example, at the end of the story, the player is given the choice over whether or not to
murder the primary antagonist. Responsible for killing the main character's father and pretty much all of the main story's grief. He's a cold, brutal killer and you wouldn't get many arguments against the idea he deserved such a fate. But if the player does choose this, the game essentially slaps the player in the face by the way it presents it.
Almost the entire murder scene is shown through the villains eyes as you watch your player character choke the life out of him. He doesn't look heroic, he looks angry and villainous. In very certain terms, it forces a literal and metaphorical mirror to the player to see the consequences of their actions. Very often in these kinds of games, and even in this game many times, choice is an illusion. But the ones that matter, they make you feel it if your judgment is poor and unheroic.
On a side note about the above spoiler, it's lowkey kind of revealing that, as of this weekend,
a sizeable majority of players decided to choose murder at the end. Which is both not surprising but still disappointing.
