Despelote should feel a sense of peculiarity. The protagonist, set in Ecuador during the country’s historic World Cup qualifying campaign in 2001, is a half-remembered version of the game’s lead developer. But there’s nothing unique about it either. Despelote is a very authentic and personal game, and it stands for universal truth.
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Despelote is a game about soccer and helps to be a sport that weaves into the structure of everyday life across borders. Julian is 8 years old and we experience his life at home and school, at family weddings and later at teenage parties. There is an elegant quality in the way these moments bleed together. It is depicted in the first person, as if he was walking through an old photograph of gin printed on colored paper, and depicts an ambiguous lens over the main character’s memory.
When you’re not drawn into the scene as if you were beginning to fantasize, your mother led you there, so you enter them. Despelote lacks an agency that anyone who remembers being a child is familiar with, and the freedom you have always come through the lens of football. You’re out of school and hurrying to kick-about with your friends. The right tick was used on the hooves, passing the ball at a satisfactory weight. Enjoy yourself during family gatherings by kicking balloons – and by kicking whatever is available, in any situation in practice. You listen to the conversation around you.
Julian never takes part in these conversations, but they do hear them. A background of adult chatter heard during Tinotini’s soccer 99 car trips and games, a 1994 homage to soccer in the game. You can get a glimpse of the match moments through the shop window or on the radio on TV. The sense is that soccer is important everywhere, but you just have a child’s window into that world.
The exception is a short moment between chapters. Voiceover is when it provides the context for what a qualifying match means for Ecuador, who had fallen into economic turmoil in 2001 and never qualified for the World Cup. This same narration sometimes completely destroys the fourth wall and provides context for the creation of the game. Despelote is autobiographical rather than slavish, and its goal is to capture the designer’s childhood senses rather than literal details.
Despelote takes just over 2 hours to play. In other words, I am reluctant to provide many literal details in this review.
If Despelote is fluent in the language of soccer and soccer fandoms, he is fluent in the language of video games as well. That’s obvious when you play Tino Tini. This offers some of Despelote’s most beautiful moments, but also in the stunning use of the medium to tell a linear story. In some ways, Despelote is the successor to smash cut editing of 30 Loving Flight of Loving Flights than Blendo Games’ own recent work. In other ways, it is entirely its own, confident, fully formed, pulling everything from comics to cinema verites, but surpassing them to tell the story in a way that only video games can do.
Soccer was a constant companion in my own life, so I’m very obsessed with Deporete. My childhood memories are infectiously from hundreds of hours spent playing wise football, or from a Kiffott in the park where my friends and I provided their own color commentary and adopted the role of Regens from the Championship Manenger campaign. When I dreamed, I also dreamed of playing soccer. If you didn’t have such a relationship with sports, I think Despelote might help explain to you what it means to the people it does. In particular, it is an antidote to the UK’s football culture defined solely by the Megabacks Premier League, and may be with billionaires and a sports scattering project sponsored by the state.
But even if Despelote just appeals to us who already have football in our hearts, it’s not a knock on it. In a medium dominated by genre pastiche and YA fiction ratios, it’s really worth having video games that feel the truth.