Why You Liked … Dispatch

Gaming, whether as a form of entertainment or art, has had a troubled relationship with ‘storytelling’. Many people comment on the story of games as being good or bad, but they often mistake agency for story. A story has a start, middle, and an end, with meaningful characters, consequences, and crucially, pacing! Games often suffer from a lack of these, but since you’re swinging the sword, the act itself is important, and you spend less time worrying about why you’re swinging it.

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Good or bad, it’s rare for a game to take advantage of the medium in the telling of the story. Let’s get into medium by using movies as an example, and the crippling problems that came about when silent movies became… loud. There was a real challenge for early silent stars when fans finally heard them. The lead with the chiselled jaw shouldn’t sound nasal or high-pitched. You couldn’t get away with playing that farmhand American if you sounded like you were from the Eastern Bloc. Technical acting skills mattered—where silent films needed flamboyance when you couldn’t use your words, talkies needed delivery. Whether it was John Gilbert’s voice or Clara Bow’s accent, a few ‘it’ actors burned up on re-entry here.

You can also imagine a radio star trying to transition to silent movies. They had to act without their greatest asset (their voice) and learn physical, visual storytelling. This period was mercifully brief for all involved due to the relentless march of progress, because video killed the radio star shortly after radio’s popularity in the 1920s.

But if you put these together—transitioning from radio to sound film—well, you had a shot, man. You got performers who had voice training and knew what a microphone was. Some of those career transitioners could take advantage of the new medium to tell a better story than a silent film actor could. You probably know who Bing Crosby and Bob Hope are for just this reason.

Back to video games: let’s talk about how few use the medium by talking about the stand-out one that did. We’re going to get into spoilers for a 2007 video game, so while I think 18 years gives us a little statute-of-limitations leeway, you’ve been warned. The OG BioShock did this wonderfully with its leaning on would-you-kindly, and it did this by exploiting a technique players had become used to. In games, there’s an often-used trope where a disembodied voice on the end of the radio is a sort of magical helper, delivering anything from exposition to instructions to the player. We lost pack-in manuals in our retail boxes in favour of a talking head in the top left of our screen who’d explain how guns worked. BioShock’s Irish-accented Atlas did this by asking the player to complete mundane tasks, all in the guise of our familiar, helpful in-game assistants. We’d bought into the idea of Atlas before we started the game, because the trope was a baked-in part of the medium.

Because Atlas is wonderfully Irish, he doesn’t say ‘Please’ so much as ‘Would you kindly’. ‘Pick up the gun’ becomes ‘Would you kindly pick up the gun’. The player continues following Atlas’s instructions, right until the moment Atlas tells the player, “Would you kindly kill this person.” Then the game removes control from you, and your avatar murders someone you didn’t want to bury. That lauded agency is deleted, revealing—again, spoilers!—that you’re a pawn. Would-you-kindly is a code word that makes your brainwashed schmuck do something against your will; as the player, we thought we were being helped by a fancy instruction manual, but the game’s story is that we, the player’s character, are a sucker. We’ve been played, but masterfully: BioShock used a medium-based trope as a storytelling mechanic that wouldn’t have the same impact in a movie, because movies don’t expect agency to be such an embodied part of storytelling.

Well, Dispatch does the same fucken thing.

Anxiety as Gameplay

I appreciate we’ve talked a lot about agency, games, and BioShock, but this is actually a Dispatch review. Dispatch, the latest maybe-Critical Role, maybe-Telltale game, puts you in the washed-up shoes of Bob Robertson, a third-generation Mecha Man superhero. Your dad, and his dad before him, were all Mecha Man: different suit, but same job description. Shit went bad, like, real bad, and the suit that made you super is now a collection of badly damaged metal and plastic you can’t even use as spares.

Thing is, Bob’s a hero. We’ll get to sacrifice and purpose later, but for now, just understand that Bob is not ready to stop helping people. It’s in his blood. He’s constructed from the idea that doing good is not just a duty, but a calling. As we kick off the game as Robert, we’re introduced to a new posse: a group of has-beens, wannabes, washed-up heroes, or derelict reclamation cases called the Z Team. These reprobates are essentially career criminals on a get-to-green plan; they need to give their time to the SDN, the Superhero Dispatch Network, as supes for hire. It’s last call for these assholes. If they flunk out, they’re done.

As Robert, you’re their dispatcher, a quasi-amalgam of team leader, manager, life coach, counsellor, and… hell, I’m getting ahead of myself again. But as a dispatcher, your job is to send these miscreants to wherever they’re needed. There’s tension in the job, whether it’s solving puzzles, getting the right hero assigned to a gig, or dealing with the hard losses of a Kobayashi Maru. While Dispatch presents as an animated movie or a graphic novel come to life, it’s also delivering a thin layer of management sim. It’s just deep enough, in fact, to do a BioShock on you. It makes you feel what it’s like to be behind the controls of a superhero dispatch team. It makes you feel what it’s like to have people on your team that you give a shit about, and what it’s like to let them down because you’re not good enough.

There’s one scene as the game marches through its chapters where you’re presented with one of the many hacking puzzles. These are usually not very hard, but this one is as brutal as an anvil to the face. The tension’s already high because one of the team, someone you’ve taken under your wing, is finally, just maybe, trying to be a hero. And they’ve put themselves at risk, not for fame or glory, but because it’s important to Robert Robertson. You’re not meant to succeed at the hacking puzzle. It’s one of those Kobayashi Maru moments. But let me tell you: you want to. You need to.

Because Dispatch makes you feel like failed Mecha Man Robert Robertson.

It BioShocks you right to 11: you’re invested in the trope, the in-game hacking puzzle you’re used to by now. And you’re used to winning them. It rug-pulls the moment so effectively, you get whiplash. And it does this while proving it understood the assignment: the most important part of storytelling is about the people, whether you care about them, and whether what you just failed to do made you sit staring at the credits with a what-did-I-just-do look on your face.

Yeah. That was me at the end of Episode 4.

Wait, Episode 4?

A divisive element of the games that made Telltale famous was their episodic model. It’s just like a Netflix show, but the modern kind where Disney wants to reach into your wallet for months, so they string a series out over three billing cycles. The good news is that Dispatch has just one payment, but I played it over the episodic release cadence.

I admit, this sucked. It didn’t suck because I have a philosophical problem with games having chapters, but because once I’d finished a duo of episodes, I needed to wait for next week’s payload. From a functional point of view, you’re not going to forget what’s going on in the story, but I found it a little tricky to remember some of the mechanical nuances of dispatching my wannabe heroes.

The game has a faux level-up mechanic, where you can both buff your losers—say, make them smarter or send them to the gym with a protein shake. But you can also send them to school, where they can unlock special abilities or tricks. These can be things like a hero being able to return faster from a job, which means less downtime, or being able to respec their abilities a little dynamically. I found these didn’t stick as well with me during my week-long breaks. Which one of these philistines has a special power when teamed up with another? Which heals a squadmate? Fucked if I could remember.

It’s unlikely to be a problem now, as the whole game’s out! You can binge-watch, or I guess binge-play, the entire game without the artificial brake. What you’re still going to be dealing with is the Digital Deluxe Edition content problem. You can buy this as an add-on, and while it’s not really required, it promises some cool shit, man, like actual comics. These are—painfully—built into the game’s client itself, but there’s a method behind this madness. The comics-in-client delivery mechanism isn’t some kind of dystopian anti-piracy measure, but an alignment to the game’s story-drip system. They provide additional backstory to what you discover through playing the game, and if you found out the specifics behind Blonde Blazer and Phenomaman before the game forces decisions around them, it’d break the whole thing.

It still irritated me, maybe not as much as a steel-wool enema, but I can’t help but think there’s a better way.

It’s Art, Stupid

One of the most powerful parts of Dispatch is its sense of style. The game looks like high-quality anime, a graphic novel come to life, with a lush and vivid superhero interpretation. Blonde Blazer looks almost classical. Mecha Man’s suit is built on brutalism, a hard shell around a man of gold. Invisigal is cooler than cool, a girl you wish you knew a little better. And on and on it goes, each villainous hero imbued with such individual characteristics you can’t help but recognise them from a silhouette alone.

The music is also truly excellent. There are a couple of tracks on the soundtrack I’ve added to playlists to take with me beyond the game.

But it’s not just the art or the banging beats. Each of the characters is acted by S-tier talent. There were only two that didn’t really gel with me, but the rest were people I wanted to invite over for beers and pizza. And those two are more than made up for by Jeffrey Fucking Wright, whose Chase is absurdly well done. You’re going to be spending a lot of time with these people in your ears, and it says something that when the credits rolled, I wanted to keep hanging out with them. The game oozes such a strong sense of identity, I don’t think you can compare it to a ‘superhero’ movie. Those feel very similar to each other these days, with CGI-heavy, character-light motifs; Dispatch is the game that understands it’s the ‘hero’ part of ‘superhero’ that’s important… And even the darkest of us can have a hero within.

Which is probably a good place to talk about Aaron Paul, Mecha Man, and the meaning of sacrifice.

Being Robert

It’s time I made good on my promise to talk about Dispatch’s understanding of consequence.

Robert Robertson is a man who’s worn the suit for much of his life. As a runt kid, his babysitter was a super-fast superhero. His father was Mecha Man, like his father before him. It’s almost like a Steve Earle song, except everyone who’s worn the Mecha Man suit has died in it.

Robert is the first who didn’t. But he almost did, and that’s left him feeling like a failure. Not that he didn’t beat the Big Bad, although that’s a part of it. It’s that he didn’t go down with the ship. He questions whether he gave it his all—whether he’s really Mecha Man, or just Robert. Some guy without any special talents, doing the best he can like the rest of us.

That changes the night he meets Blonde Blazer. She’s a bona fide Captain Marvel style of hero, glowing eyes, super strength, flight, and all. You have the opportunity to drink with her at a bar and see where that goes, and for Robert, this is one of those life moments. It’s not whether he gets to kiss the girl.

It’s whether he thinks he’s worthy of kissing the girl.

Throughout your Dispatch journey as Robert, you learn more about the man you are. You have choices to make along the way, and those are reflected in the story in ways that Mass Effect 3’s ending could only yearn for. I mentioned kissing the girl, but there’s another girl, too, and whether you want to kiss one, both, or neither is going to be reflected not just in your journey, but in theirs. See, Robert is a consequences vector. The things he does matter, and not because the game is trying to give the player agency.

They matter because what you, as the player, choose to do will impact the people in the story with you. Every moment you fail, every time you succeed, and every decision you make that prioritises one value over another is reflected in how your Z Team finishes at the end. Does everyone make it out alive? Is anyone going to jail? Will the heroes fall, or will the villains be redeemed?

And if someone other than you makes a mistake, do you have the strength and courage to help them through and perhaps, just a little, begin to understand that you’re only human?

Dispatch’s lessons are profound. Yes, it’s a superhero story, but it’s also a people story. Not just fictional people—the guy who can turn into an angrier bat or the girl who can turn invisible. It’s the kind of game that’s going to make you question a lot of the relationships in your life, and whether you might be leaving heroism on the shelf for the easy path.

And none of this emotional weight would land without Aaron Paul’s performance. Paul’s an actor I’m a little familiar with, but if I’m being honest, I haven’t felt a strong gravitational attraction to his work. Dispatch has completely changed that view for me. Paul imbues Robert with humour, honour, fear, integrity, bravery, and a sense of purpose I think we all wish we could have. And we can, for the time we’re playing Dispatch. We can be the hero the people around us need.

And while we’re doing that, we might just learn a little about what it means to exist without armour, to live the best ordinary life we can, and look after the people who need it. Just because you’re a demon doesn’t mean you have all the answers. Just because you’re made of stone doesn’t mean you don’t stumble when you screw up. The game made me consider how I was acting towards and with those around me. It made me wonder—a lot—about how people view themselves, and whether there’s a part we have to play in their redemption story.

When the credits rolled, the game told me that through it all, my Robert tried to stay true to his principles. To do the right thing, even when it was hard. And I think that’s probably what we all hope we can do.

So, What?

Dispatch isn’t so much a game about superheroes as it is a story that you feel. With acting that embodies each character with a distinct soul, art that enriches each action with purpose, and music that elevates the moments that matter, it’s an experience second to none.

I don’t give reviews a score. But Dispatch made me wonder if I should. If a one-star is ‘You shouldn’t even piss on this to put it out if it’s on fire’, then a five-star must be the peak experience of ‘You must play this before you die’.

And Dispatch is a game you must play before you die.

What did you think of Dispatch? Let me know in the comments below if you were Team Blazer or Team Invisigal. If you’re pining to hear Jeffrey Wright swear more than Billy Connolly, click Like! And thanks for watching.

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