Superhero narrative romp Dispatch, judging by the two episodes that I’ve played so far, is rad. It’s an evolution of the Telltale style—from Telltale vets unsurprisingly—that tightens up the format and shakes off some cobwebs.
It’s much more of an interactive TV show than I’m used to, pushing you from one scene to the next without letting you wander around and explore. But that gives it an appropriately brisk pace and kinetic energy that I’m finding pretty damn refreshing.
But when I realised it was going to be an episodic deal, I scoffed. An episodic game? In the year of our lord 2025? In the 2010s, when Telltale started releasing all of its games episodically, it was novel. It was also before streamers took over TV and dumped entire seasons on us instantly.
Now the streamers have started to go back to traditional release schedules, but it still seemed wrong to have to wait to enjoy more of a game. It’s finished. It’s ready. Why can’t I devour the whole thing?
My lack of chill was even more overt after finishing the first episode, Pivot, which is 100% setup and only briefly lets you experience its most notable novelty. See, you play Mecha Man, AKA Robert Robertson. A superhero with a mech suit, whose mech suit is now totalled.
In Pivot, you’re offered a new gig while you’re drowning your sorrows in a bar: become a superhero dispatcher, managing a group of heroes and sending them out on missions while you sit at your desk. It’s a fun system, but one that you barely get any time with before the credits roll.
After 50 minutes, I was done with the first episode. So it’s a good thing that AdHoc Studio is releasing two at a time. The second episode, Onboard, is much stronger, and it gives you a full shift as a dispatcher. It’s also a much meatier episode, so by the end I didn’t feel like I’d been given the boot before I’d had my fun.
What was really surprising, though, was that I didn’t feel compelled to play the third episode. Reviewers have been given four out of eight, and for the rest we’ll have to wait just like you. So I could have continued to play.
But as my brain starts to adjust to TV shows releasing weekly again, I find myself seeing the value in it. I want to wait for everyone else to play the first two episodes and then chat about it, before I dive back in for more. I want to have a new episode to look forward to, to sit with what happened in the last one, and to make predictions about where things are heading.
I find myself wanting to savour it, but also to not get too far ahead and then wait even longer to get my fix. And it just feels right; more so than it did in Telltale’s episodic games, especially the early ones, which were still trying to be adventure games rather than fully embracing the idea of interactive TV shows.
Maybe it just feels more earned? This is a creative choice made to fit the style of game, rather than a practical one that players aren’t going to care about. Telltale didn’t make each series all at once, instead working on episodes sequentially, which led to long waits. After the premiere of The Walking Dead, A New Day, we had to wait for more than two months before the second episode, Starved for Help, appeared. In some cases the wait was even longer.
The first season of Dispatch, meanwhile, will be over in a month. We’re getting two episodes a week for four weeks. So it’s both paced like a TV show, and releasing with the cadence of one. And each two-episode drop will still be fresh in our minds when the next ones appear.
And while you’re enjoying them, spare a thought for those of us who played the second episode of The Walking Dead: The Final Season in September, 2018 and then had to wait until 2019 to play the third. We got four episodes and it took more than seven months.
With Dispatch, then, it feels like we’re seeing how episodic interactive TV shows should work. Should be released. And I think a lot of the negativity around episodic deals stems from their mishandling previously. Dispatch is doing it right.
