I love football (soccer if you’re from parts of the world that are WRONG). I remember watching the FA Cup final with my dad in 1996, which Manchester United won 1-0 against Liverpool (whose squad wore ridiculous white suits in the lead up to the game). But I wasn’t that interested at the time. What captured my imagination was later that summer: Euro ‘96. England were playing in the European Championships, a tournament held in my home country. What a time to be alive.
Why have I told you all of this? Because Despelote brought all of those feelings back to me. The nostalgia I had for the time when I was a kid and there was something important happening around me, yet I couldn’t understand exactly HOW important until much later.
Despelote tells the story of Julian, an eight-year-old boy living in Quito, Ecuador, in 2001, in the lead up to their football team qualifying for the 2002 World Cup in Japan and South Korea, the first time Ecuador had qualified for the competition. Published by Panic, this semi-autobiographical experience got me right in the feels.
It’s 2001, and Ecuador has a chance to qualify for the World Cup for the very first time in their history. They need five points from five games to make it to their debut tournament. Football fever is hitting the country by storm, making the people forget about their many troubles.
Despelote takes place on the days of those five qualifiers with Julian, just a child, soaking it all in. He is aware of it happening, but it’s felt through interactions with his family, friends, and the people in his town. Whether it is counting down the minutes until the end of school or looking after his kid sister, the atmosphere and the country’s energy is absorbed through osmosis from all around him.
It’s no wonder this is a core memory for one of the developers.
This game will not be for everyone. A lot of it is just vibes. There’s a good chance that, like me, you’ll be wondering at some points, “What the heck am I actually supposed to be doing here?” But a lot of that doesn’t actually matter. You’re supposed to be there, on the streets of Quito, mucking around as a kid with your friends.
The gameplay is split into two: the first person and the game within the game. Let’s start with the game within a game, playing football on a console in your front room. It feels a lot like Sensible Soccer, not even having the sorts of “advanced” mechanics available in the likes of FIFA International Soccer on the SEGA Genesis. It’s a top-down football sim that has you running towards the opposition goal and then kicking with the right analogue stick like you would swing a club in PGA 2K games. My core memories were triggered hard, but the developers were really smart, limiting it to two or three sections so it didn’t overstay its welcome.
The rest of the game is you, running around as an eight-year-old boy, playing football with friends (using the same controls as the Sensible Soccer-like game), playing football with other stuff like bottles, balloons or even VHS tapes, or simply taking in the Ecuadorian vibes. You can watch clips of the World Cup qualifiers on televisions in show windows. You can go and annoy old people in the park by chasing pigeons away. But that’s not the point. This game just wants you to live in a politically charged world where its problems are forgotten for a moment, and the country joins together for a common cause.
The graphics are unique. It reminds me of an old CRT television with a weak signal, all fuzzy, but you can still identify the details underneath. This fuzzy picture is color-washed with different hues on the different days you play through. Interactables and character models (including yourself) are clear but cartoony, with a black outline and a white fill. It’s a fitting style for a title that is so dripping with nostalgia that I sometimes needed an umbrella. It is very effective with what it’s trying to evoke.
Sound design in this game is deeply impressive. As narrated near the end of the game, the ambient sounds were sampled within a park in Quito, and that’s why it all feels authentic. The clips of the football matches also contain actual audio commentaries as well, so it’s all real. The entirety of this game is in Spanish, and I played with English subtitles. Although there was quite a bit of reading, I didn’t mind. It all added to the vibe.
I played Despelote on a base PS5 and I had absolutely no issues with performance or bugs. I didn’t notice any frame drops, sound desynchronisation, pop-in or pop-out or anything else. The game ran perfectly for its circa three hours of runtime.
Despelote is not a game I can recommend to everyone. There are a whole host of real-ass GAMERS that would say that this isn’t actually a video game with a clear goal and story that matches what little “gameplay” there is. I would say to those people that you’re missing the point, but I get it. Everyone else should give this a shot.
This game is a story that has to be experienced through the absorption of atmosphere and vibes. It’s a clear lesson in nostalgia and a moving historical education on a South American country that doesn’t get a lot of notice in the media. Despelote is individually Ecuadorian, and that’s beautiful.
Add to this the footballing elements that remind me of my own journey with the sport, and you’ve got something that really hit me in the feels. It took me back to Euro ‘96, watching Gazza score that great goal against Scotland. It brought the beginnings of a tear to my eye, and this game did that to me.
I challenge any sports fan to not feel the same.
Despelote is out now for PS4, PS5, Xbox Series S and X, PC and coming soon to Nintendo Switch for around $15.
