Depelote should feel idiosyncratic. Located in Ecuador during the qualification campaign of the country cup in the country in 2001, its protagonist is a half -high version of the main developer of the game. However, there is nothing special about this either. Desppelote is such an authentic and personal game that it strikes on universal truths.
It helps that Desppelote is a game on football, a sport that transcends borders and is woven in the fabric of daily life. Julian is eight years old and we live his life at home and school during family weddings and, later, adolescent evenings. There is an elegiac quality in the way these moments bleed together, represented in the first person as if you were walking through a zine of old photos printed on colored paper, cheap ink a blurred lens on the memories of the protagonist.
When it is not pulled in scenes as if it started a reverie, you enter it because your mother has led you there, his hand around your wrist while you hang out behind. There is a lack of Despélote agency which will be familiar to anyone who remembers being a child, and all freedom that you have always passed through the objective of football. You rush out of school to kick with friends, the right stick used to pass and sabotage a ball with a satisfactory weight. You entertain yourself during a family gathering by kicking a ball – and really in any situation by kicking what is available. During all this time, you hear a conversation around you.
Julian never participates in these conversations, but they heard, a chatty background for adults heard during car trips or Tino Tini football matches, a game in the game and a tribute to Dino Dini football from 1994. The qualified matches of the equator, which offer the game a framing device and its clearest narrative stages. You see moments of matches on television via store windows or radio. The feeling is that football is everywhere, captain, but you only have a child’s window in this world.
The exceptions are brief moments, between the chapters, when the voiceover offers a context for what the qualification matches mean for the equator – a nation which, in 2001, was in economic agitation and which had never qualified for a World Cup. This same voiceover breaks the fourth wall entirely sometimes, offering a context on the creation of the game. Desppelote is autobiographical without being servile, its objective is to capture more the feeling of the designer’s childhood than the literal detail.
Depelote will take you a little more than two hours to play, which means that I am reluctant to offer a lot of literal details in this review.
If Depelote commonly speaks the language of football and football fandom, he also speaks the language of video games. It is obvious when you play Tino Tini, which offers some of the most beautiful moments of Desppelote, but also in its masterful use of the medium to tell a linear story. In some respects, Depelote is more a successor to the Smash Cut edition of thirty flights from Loving than the recent work of Blendo Games. In other respects, it is entirely his own thing, confident and fully formed, based on everything, comics at Truth cinema but transcendent to tell a story in a way that only video games can.
Maybe I’m so in love with Despolete because football was a constant companion in my own life. My childhood memories are inextricable from hundreds of hours spent playing sensible football, or kickabouts in the park in which my friends and I provided our own color commentary and adopted the roles of our campaigns to handle the championship. When I dreamed, I also dreamed of football. I think that if you have never had this kind of relationship with sport, Depelote could help you explain what it means for people who do. I think in particular that it could be an antidote for a culture of British football often defined only by the Megabucks Premier League, with its millionaire players and its plans for the sports claim sponsored by the State.
However, even if Depelote calls on those of us who already have football in our hearts, it is hardly a hit. In a medium often dominated by the genus Pasche and the tropes of fiction, what a treat is to have a video game that seems true.
