Phenixx Gaming

There’s only so much that you can learn about the world in school, as World History classes can’t touch upon every region and every significant event within the wide reaches of the globe. While video games are typically a medium where players will turn their brain off, it can also be an informative experience with an engaging output. In the case of despelote, it’s a snapshot into what life looked like in Ecuador when the entire country was glued to their televisions and radios to see their national team qualify for the World Cup for the first time.

Within despelote, you control Julian, the namesake of the developer of the game, at eight years old during the exhilarating World Cup qualifiers. With fútbol being at the forefront of everyone’s mind, you’ll not only kick the ball around any chance you get, but encounter everyone around you fiending for the sport as well. It gets in the way of formal events, family dinners, and everything in between; truly a fever pitch, it was also a distraction towards the country’s economic turmoil as they switched to the US dollar at the same time as these soccer games.

The plot in despelote jumps around a ton as Julian’s childhood and adolescence unfold. Unfortunately, it happens so often that you could easily get whiplash, as one moment, you’re playing hide-and-seek with your sister in the town’s park, and the next, you’re at a teen party getting wasted on alcohol before getting scolded by your now-elderly mother. The back-and-forth dampens the game’s emotional beats, and it can’t pull off the Pulp Fiction sequencing that I hoped it could. Thankfully, despelote‘s strong presentation outweighs the perplexing storytelling, and it’s not enough of a detractor to stop playing from the game’s compact two-hour runtime.

The shining factor of despelote is undoubtedly its visual splendor. Akin to Return of the Obra Dinn, the setting of Quito is engulfed in a one-bit dither, with characters rendered as static paper cutouts. It’s an art style that never gets old, as each new scene utilizes a different color that matches the mood accurately. despelote is going to catch a lot of eyes with this, as it did mine during a past Steam Next Fest and warranted an immediate wishlist. Good thing that the full game expounded on this and delivered a striking finished product, as the brief, fleeting experience is one that is rarely dull, despite some objectives being unclear, resulting in running in circles.

As a compelling first-person adventure and a glimpse into a little-known historical event from South America, despelote is magnificent. To its credit, the immersion factor is there, as well, but I was hoping for some more coherence from point A to B in the tale that despelote had to tell. Despite that, it’s still a solid slice of life in Ecuador with an unforgettable presentation and some great representation for a country’s highly celebrated moment in history.

A PC review copy of Despelote was provided by Panic Games for the purposes of this review.

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Despelote

$14.99

7

Score

7.0/10

Pros

• Immaculate Presentation
• Convincing Voice Acting

Cons

• Disjointed Narrative
• Lots of Getting Stuck