Nicholas Sceusa

Gameplay and Level Designer

nicksceusa@gmail.com

July 2025 - In Progress

A Look at Dispatch - 7/--/25

Dispatch is a casual action adventure game where you manage a group of superheros who, for a lack of a better description, are somewhat lacking a typical hero's attitude. Essentially you have to work with a group of misfits. The game itself includes elements of strategy but a big focus and point of attraction are the narrative elements and characters. If you are familiar with "The Wolf Among Us", "Tales from the Borderlands", or "The Walking Dead" from the studio Telltale this game will feel familiar to you.

According to the game's Steam page, writers and directors from Telltale worked on the game. This has resulted in their famous narrative system being brought into Dispatch. If you are not familiar with the mechanics, there are moments during characters interactions or specific events where you have to choose from 3 options. There is a time limit so you need to think fast. Characters will then react positively or negatively depending on your choice. However, this is inferred based on the character's facial expressions and body language. The game only tells you that "they will remember this".

For example, in this sequence below, a rather large fellow named Roy, opted to introduce himself with a fist bump in the men's room. While a little unorthodox, I decided to go with the fist bump as he struck me as a sensitive fella contrary to his size. As the text indicates, Roy will remember this later and this means his relationship with you has changed slightly.

In previous games, characters who you form a positive relationship with will assist you during critical moments. Meanwhile characters who dislike you are more likely to abandon or fight you depending on the circumstances. For example in the Walking Dead, there are several events where other characters can choose to save you or abandon you during zombie attacks. It all depends on who you decide to support and how you approach difficult situations. This game play loops looks something like this:

The smaller loop occurs regularly from moment to moment where the game reacts to your choices and updates your character relationships.

The outer loop is very similar. Your character relationships and circumstances in the game are updated; however, the characters will react automatically after major story events. This often reflects intense and stressful situations in the story where panic or reflexive thinking occurs.

These loops could be condensed together, but for clarity have been separated to represent short term game play versus long term game play. This also shows how the narrative mechanics effect the entire game. However, Dispatch doesn't entirely rely on the old formula. Things have been changed up a bit.

Since you are the team dispatcher, you primarily play the game from a terminal. This is where you receive calls regarding emergencies or other situations that require heroes. You access the emergency, read the information on what stats would be most beneficial, and then pick a hero best suited to complete the task. If the hero is successful, that hero gains experience which can allow them to level up and handle more difficult tasks. For example, in the sequence below a call was given out to help recover a lost balloon for a child. I chose a hero with high strength for climbing. While mobility would have been better, the hero "Punch Up", overlapped with enough of the job stat requirements to complete it.

There are a couple of complications of course. A hero is not always available. They need time to travel to the job, complete it, return to base, and rest. This may result in you sending another hero to a job that they may not be entirely suited for, potentially causing them to become injured or downed and unavailable for longer periods of time. Your team of misfits are also not suited to every job. Note in the previous example that one of the requirements is "don't scare the child". It would likely be a bad idea to send the giant man-bat or blade wielding demon despite their higher mobility. Hero's also have their own interests and peculiarities. They may want to do certain jobs due to personal interests, such as Sonar being a big fan of a tech company and wanting to meet the CEO while being his bodyguard.

While the game does inform you about the results of the job, it does not tell you how each mission affects your team personally. This is a game highly driven by character and story. I personally suspect that each characters success and failure rate on missions will also influence their relationship with you and key points during the story. This adds an interesting layer to both the story and game play as they are intertwined at various levels. Again this is mainly a hypothesis, but it would make sense for relationships to change depending on the working conditions and interactions.

Essentially the game play loop might look something like this:

-Personally speaking this is a welcomed addition to the game. I had a lot of fun playing through many of the Telltale series and I am curious if it has any updates or changes. It will also be familiar to many players interested in narrative focused adventures and will likely help pull in a larger audience. However, I am getting ahead of myself. Lets get to the nitty gritty and talk about the game play.

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