Dispatch is a swanky visual novel with light strategy game elements in which you manage a bunch of reformed supervillains, assigning them to pop-up emergencies around town. So far, I have asked a dancing French assassin to rescue a balloon from a tree, sent a randomly transforming literal batman to thwart a boat robbery, ordered a golem and an invisible woman to break up a barfight between rival vigilantes, and tasked a light-manipulating popstar with cutting a supermarket ribbon.
We managed to retrieve the balloon and open the supermarket with flying colours, but the boat is now at the bottom of the harbour. The golem and the invisible woman tried to resolve the barfight firstly by proposing that the participants form a Dynamic Duo, and then by way of a drinking competition. Now, the bar is in ruins. Also, the team’s Human Torch equivalent can’t go on break without starting a fire.
It’s a laugh, mostly because all these supervillains have pretty good voice actors, and they are given ample words to wallow around in. Each shift teems with podcasty backchat between the patrolling heroes, all of which seems to fit organically around your decisions and interjections as dispatcher. Your character, the newly mech-less and deskbound Mecha Man, is voiced by Aaron Paul off Breaking Bad. There’s also Westworld and Boardwalk Empire’s Jeffery Wright, who plays a speedster who has artificially aged himself while using his powers. Other performers include Laura Bailey off The Last Of Us Part 2, Critical Role’s Matthew Mercer and Youtuber Jacksepticeye.
Between shifts, there are suavely animated and directed story scenes in which you hang out with these invariably outsized personalities, making the occasional three-way dialogue choice. The game’s creators, AdHoc Studio, include a few of the Telltale alumni behind Tales From The Borderlands and The Wolf Among Us. I definitely get a Wolf Among Us vibe from this: each character’s baggage is writ large through their powers, and there are more obvious callbacks such as an “X will remember that” notification.
There’ve been a fair few “team of misfits” superhero stories now across TV, film and games. It’s easy to do this kind of thing badly, if the cast are too WACKY and the banter is too overclocked. It also risks being crass when you overlap the comedy freakshow element with portrayals of, say, neurodivergence or disability, of which there are a few in Dispatch.
Its too early to make a call there, but the 20 minutes I’ve played of Dispatch’s Steam demo inspires some confidence, though there are some racialised jokes that make me worry about punchlines down the road. The writing is both more fluid and less showy than it may seem in the above trailer, and a lot ruder. You will definitely feel a certain warmth for the game if you pine for Telltale and are sceptical of the studio’s “rebirth” under LCG Entertainment. Why not give the demo a go?
