The Shacknews staff was aware of AdHoc Studio, a team comprised of former developers from Telltale Games, Ubisoft, Night School Studio, and others. Still, *Dispatch* is a game that caught most of us by surprise. With a release date calendar filled with heavy AAA hitters and indie darlings, AdHoc’s debut almost slipped under our radar.
It took Donovan Erskine jumping into Slack one day and asking if anybody else on staff had played it for the rest of us to start to take notice. Well, it took him a few tries. By the third time he asked, I finally said, “You know what? Enough people are talking about it, why not? Let’s give it a shot.”
There were many reasons why I’m glad I did and chief among them was that catching up with *Dispatch* hardly took any time at all. That’s a big difference from many of its companions and, honestly, should be the model for these types of stories going forward.
I went into *Dispatch* fairly cold, having only seen some promotional images. I was almost instantly dazzled by its more polished animation style, one that looks like it would be at home on YouTube or the average streaming service. It looked like standard Telltale fare, but set in a world of superheroes.
After a lengthy cold open sequence, the story’s focus turned to Robert Robertson living his post-superhero life and eventually being recruited to act as a dispatcher to reformed supervillains. The introduction, the press conference scene, the subsequent bar scene, the meeting with Blonde Blazer, and its aftermath are all sequences that I would have expected to have to carve out a lot of time to get through.
Instead, the credits started rolling on the first episode, I looked at my phone, and I saw that only an hour had passed. I felt like I had gotten a full story experience, some satisfying gameplay sequences, and enough of a tease for what’s next — and I got it all done in a matter of minutes.
Part of that can be attributed to AdHoc cutting one of the most time-consuming aspects of these games: the exploration. There’s no time spent walking around exploring Robert’s apartment, the dispatch headquarters, the bar, the crime scenes, or anything else.
In the past, I was one of those people who would explore these areas thoroughly. That meant checking every corner, talking to every single NPC, interacting with every object, and that would take up to 10, maybe 20 minutes. Even when Telltale was at the top of its game with classics like *The Walking Dead*, *The Wolf Among Us*, and *Tales from the Borderlands*, these exploration sections often ground the story to a halt. It’s where these games would drag — and it would be tens of minutes at a time before the story would continue.
*Dispatch* doesn’t do that. There are no exploration sections at all, so the story keeps going.
Instead, *Dispatch*’s gameplay involves the titular dispatch system that involves sending out individual or teams of heroes from the available roster to citizens in need. It’s a system that flows elegantly and also incorporates both story elements and additional gameplay ideas, such as hacking mini-games. These sections go on long enough to help set the table for the next part of the story and no more than that.
There are fair questions about how much the dispatch success rate matters, but that’s a conversation for the full review.
Cutting out tedious exploration and refining the gameplay elements of a Telltale-style game is a major positive for *Dispatch*. It allows AdHoc to tell its story in a more streamlined way, cutting the overall runtime down without compromising any satisfaction that might come from the narrative.
There are still big choices to be made, there are still gameplay sections, and there are still those watercooler moments that made the best Telltale games such classics. Now they’re executed in such a way that two episodes can be played in a single night.
It’s a big change from later Telltale games or modern Telltale-style games. I’m somebody who loves and swears by the *Life is Strange* series, but there’s something about it shifting to full $50 self-contained stories that make their newer efforts feel a little bloated. All apologies to Max Caulfield, but that runtime doesn’t have me in any rush to go back and catch up, not when there are so many other games to play.
Add this to *Dispatch*’s weekly release schedule and it’s fair to say that AdHoc is aware of the current gaming climate.
There are so many games out there, many excellent games like *Clair Obscur: Expedition 33*, *Hades 2*, *Hollow Knight: Silksong*, and others like it that demand dozens upon dozens of hours. There are only so many hours in the day, so it feels like a major plus that a game like *Dispatch* can tell its story in a satisfying way and get everyone on their way in just a few hours.
It knows what it wants to be, gets in, gets out, and ideally makes everyone happy. So far, everything is great.
The final episodes are set to release next week and I’ve carved out the exact time to play them. Even if they don’t necessarily live up to my expectations, I can appreciate that *Dispatch* respects my busy life and hope that other games like it will follow suit in the future.
https://www.shacknews.com/article/146700/dispatch-episodic-format-time-short-sessions
