Despelote

As a kid, the majority of what happens around you is not much more than a blur, so it’s no surprise that remembering your childhood means that you feel it more than you recall the facts from it. For Julián Cordero, primary developer for Despelote, the tense months leading up to Ecuador’s eventual entrance into the 2002 World Cup saturated his childhood. Despelote tells his autobiographical relationship with the sport and his hometown of Quito, Ecuador, in the summer of 2001.

What impressed me the most about Despelote is its unrelenting authenticity. As an American playing a game set in the summer of 2001, I started wondering if the events of 9/11 would come up at some point. They never do. Rather than being a class on world history or catering to an outside audience, Despelote simply asks the player to set aside their ethnocentricity before playing, and it’s a better game for it.

At the game’s core is a genuine heart about a kid doing kid things in Ecuador’s capital city. The dozens and dozens of side conversations that you can eavesdrop on or back-and-forth with your classmates is indistinguishable from what you’d catch while walking down any busy street in Quito. In many ways, it’s an Alejandro Lisandro film, an Argentine director famous for hiring non-actors for roles in order to inspire authenticity in his works. Before you point your finger at me for name-dropping, it’s worth noting that the game itself makes plenty of references to canonical Latin American films and directors. But the comparison I draw here is not to brag but to situate Despelote alongside notable works of Latin American art and to redirect attention to the flat-out astounding voice work.

While you don’t venture far beyond your corner of Quito, the conversations, concerns, worries, jokes, anger, etc. that pepper the streets give an immense liveliness, or lived-in-ness, to the city and country that Julián navigates. At first blush, you can’t tell if the voice work is done by professionals or simply the result of mic’ing an entire neighbourhood block. This is a good thing that speaks to the overall sincere realism in Despelote. Nearly everyone has something to say or feel about Ecuador’s chances at qualifying for the World Cup or their day-to-day. I recommend playing Despelote with headphones on to take full advantage of the audio panning and equalisation.

In addition to the down-to-earth atmosphere, there’s an excellent quality of sound design that contributes to the game’s authenticity. Despelote feels physical. You spend the majority of the game dribbling or kicking a soccer ball, and in each shot you take there’s the firm but dampened smack of a shoe against the ball’s skin. I spent plenty of time in Despelote feeling the ball respond closely to your thumbstick input as it soars through the air with some spin before it collides with a wall with a satisfying thump. It’s no wonder that soccer consumed Julián’s attention; it had taken mine as well.

You play soccer in two distinct modes throughout Despelote. The first, which is the mode featured in the prologue, alludes to the SNES Dino Dini’s Soccer that first launched in 1993. It’s appropriately named Tino Tini’s Soccer 99’ after Tín, a frequently referenced forward for the contemporary Ecuadorian national team. It’s a top-down soccer game in black and white. You play as Julián, who always chooses the Ecuadorian national team against every other country, battling for a spot in the World Cup. Gameplay is simple. You move over the ball to gain possession of it and can sprint and charge kicks in an effort to score. But all the emergent gameplay that made this formula so easy to sink hundreds of hours into is there. Unfortunately, you’re time-locked with your sessions in Tino Tini’s, so gameplay is limited, but it serves a greater purpose to get you into Julián’s headspace. Oftentimes you’re ignoring your parents or little sister and just playing the game to avoid confrontation, and Tino Tini’s invitation is hard to resist.

The other half of soccer gameplay consists of playing as Julián in several backyard pickup matches. While Julián has great footwork and handling, pivoting is uncomfortably slow. It’s a delicate balance between shifting your direction with the left thumbstick and simultaneously moving the right thumbstick in tandem. However, the right thumbstick is also used to initiate a pass or charge a shot, so if your thumb twitches slightly or you push forward just enough, you’ll kick the ball away from you halfway in your pivot. When you are just passing the ball around with your pals, this isn’t an issue. You can take your time to turn with the left thumbstick before kicking. In a match, however, I felt entirely outclassed by opponent players. Not only did they play aggressively (and sometimes dirty with the occasional shove) but they were quicker and much snappier with the ball. It’s hard to say if this is a deliberate decision to make Julián come across as more insecure or less skilled or if Despelote simply required the player to be better coordinated. Regardless, if you’re an achievement hunter, I highly recommend adjusting the camera sensitivity and buckling up for the matches in-game. They feel significantly more difficult than the rest of the game.

When you’re reluctantly not playing soccer, you’re finding every excuse to play soccer. Many of Julián’s memories, which take place on the qualifying match days and away from a television, will put Julián at the mercy of grown-ups telling him to be somewhere or to do something for a few hours. You’ll be told to sit and wait at a park bench for two hours. There’s a mechanic to look downward and you’ll be able to check the time. I never got a pulse on how the in-game clock worked exactly, but again, this is a game about feel rather than facts. When I would check too frequently, like many impatient eight-year-olds, time hardly moved.

But an eight-year-old isn’t gonna sit on a park bench for two hours. Not if your friends are kicking a soccer ball around. Or there’s someone you want to talk to. Or if the guy selling chochos has something to say. I spent a lot of that downtime walking around and waving to random folks to hear what they had to say before inevitably finding something, anything, to kick around. Then I’d check my watch. Sorry guys, I have to go. I tried really hard to be where I was supposed to be on time but definitely got my share of talking-tos from Mom for arriving late. In part that was due to the lack of a mini-map or map at all, but at the same time, that serves as a convenient excuse for getting too wrapped up in the day-in and day-out of the many Quito residents. If there was a map, I would probably consult it as much as I did my watch, which was not enough.

For a game that may feel fairly low stakes, I picked through the accessibility options to see how you could alter the gameplay of Despelote. Some standard features were there to help with aiming the soccer ball with a reticle or eliminating the camera bobbing along while sprinting. For a game with substantial emphasis on sound design, there is equal emphasis on sound accessibility. These ranged from a reduction in bass or lower tones, forced mono audio output and a compressor that reduces the dynamic range. Essentially, if the panning or imbalanced volume of different audio inputs is bothersome or difficult to follow, you can fine-tune your audio experience. My favourite feature is the ability to increase dialogue clarity. So much of the spoken Spanish in this game is geared for native-level speakers. Having this feature enabled allowed me to follow the voices in the game more easily, something that would make Despelote an ideal game for the classroom.

As you get further into Despelote, the game takes steps away from what you’d expect from a “walking sim” game and into more fully mixed media art. From the starting image, this is obvious in the juxtaposition of hand-drawn, black-and-white, paper-thin characters on top of colour-saturated and staticky photos. It’s unusual, to say the least. That combination made for an attention-grabbing but flat visual experience. Despelote feels two-dimensional to an extreme. However, it makes for clear visuals as you look for things or people to interact with, and it really shone best when Julián would daydream. Other mediums worm their way into the game, from archival footage to something unexpected that I don’t want to spoil. By the time I hit credits, it had won me over.

When reminiscing or reflecting on childhood, it’s hard not to insert your current self into your own history. Worse yet, it’s difficult to separate false memories from true ones. Despelote tackles this head-on. As the player works their way through the game, themes and histories blur, and you are left with an ethnographic collection of images and recordings that blend different times, conversations, and opinions on Ecuador’s qualifying run for the 2002 World Cup. In a sense the game is composed of several Juliáns who guide the player through a specific moment in time. Despelote is a slice-of-life game of a location that maybe you don’t read about often. More than just being a tour, Despelote ultimately invites the player to consider how they have constructed their own self through their lived experience and feelings toward their personal history.