Review | despelote - Deeply Personal Yet Extremely Universal
To describe despelote as a game about football is both perfectly apt and yet not enough to describe this indie entry from Julián Cordero and Sebastien Valbuena. This is a semi-autobiographical narrative about growing up with football in Ecuador that manages to be both about the sport through its gameplay and its immediate surroundings, but through a wider and deeply personal tale that unfolds to become a game about the necessity of sport and connection in the world.
Within its narrative format, the gameplay certainly faces a tremendous challenge. How do you make first-person football engaging? Some attempts have been made before, like Be A Pro options in iterations of FIFA, but these options have always felt too weighty and complex to make work. Here, the game does decent by having each kick of the ball based on flicking the right stick in the given direction, with levels that sees you running around and causing havoc with friends, playing at a tryout in a cage and even playing Tino Tini’s Soccer 99, a game that magnificently evokes classics like Sensible Soccer with its top down view. The simplicity in the controls does make moving and orienting the first-person camera slightly trickier than necessary, and they do sacrifice a bit of precision in favour of a surprisingly tight and satisfying sense of speed and control in kicking balls all over the place. That lack of precision can sometimes feel frustrating when straightforward passes can be knocked five yards away from the intended target, but the sound of a ball thumped into the sky does make up for it.
Whether that be lightly passing to friends, booting a ball to knock bottles off the wall of a grumpy pensioner, or playing a 30-yard cross-field ball, all are possible across its levels thanks to the ability to charge a kick on the same stick in a very intuitive way. Keeping it simple actually gets the football portion down to its most important distinction that football is actually a very simple game. Whether it be kids playing on a Saturday morning, a Jurgen Klopp gegenpress or a World Cup final, the basic game remains as simple as kicking a ball with friends. Running around Quito with screens blaring the national team games, whilst passing amongst mates and stealing a ball from another group feels appropriately chaotic. It helps that this is contrasted expertly with little colour and abstract environments that project an almost dream-like half-forgotten-memory-vibe to the game and with guitars serenading its gameplay, despelote often feeling like an evocation of the idea of a space rather than an actual real-life place to tremendous effect. It does create an odd but welcome disconnect between occasional gleeful sprinting around and wreaking havoc in people’s ordinary lives in a Quito square, but it generates a spontaneity that results in gameplay that feels joyful and exploratory, a unique quality to possess.
Beyond those occasional controller frustrations and the overall solid gameplay experience, the game’s true excellence lies in its narrative that fulfils the brief of making a game with tremendous depth. As Julián grows up in Quito, you follow along as Ecuador’s men's national team face the prospect of qualifying for the World Cup for the first time ever. The writing here tremendously balances the small-scale influence and how the connection of sport helps a country through a horrendous period for all. A newspaper seller reminds you after each qualifying result of regular economic turmoil and impending financial collapse. The team coach is attacked, but the team carries on. Scenes of rallies as the government looks to adopt the U.S. dollar play out as the names of Hernan Crespo and Gabriel Batistuta threaten the Ecuadorians for Argentina’s own qualification hopes. Meanwhile, the parents continue their own business of a DVD rental store in hope that better times might someday be around the corner. You do this whilst booting balls around Quito, inhabiting a character aware of this world yet wrapped up completely in the joys of playing with their mates. All of this is treated with sincerity and value.
In this, despelote truly understands the need for sport and connection and how those memories matter so much to those who lived and breathed them. Throughout my life, there are so many memories, big and small, that are connected with football. As the game reaches a genius and wonderful crescendo through some excellent use of archival footage and 3D-scanned environments, it forced me to remember many of my own football-related memories, alongside the state of the world when I experienced them. The first time I saw Nottingham Forest win at the City Ground after my first 10 trips never resulting in a win, a 4-0 victory against Reading in case you were wondering. Celebrating in a bar with strangers as Eric Dier scored the winning penalty for England against Colombia in 2018. Watching Forest’s first Premier League game with my brother and a friend, biting my nails watching them desperately defend a 1-0 lead against West Ham. Above them, distant but wonderful scenes, scoring my first goal as a kid playing on a Saturday and doing any and all celebrations I could think of in pure disbelief. Even some of the kickabouts with school friends and silly slide tackles. Any game that can evoke that is worth your time.
All of those memories were at different scales and all with different levels of attachment. Yet playing through despelote, it appreciates all those moments in football and ascribes importance to all of it. Between its chaotic park gameplay, its heartfelt reminiscence of an Ecuador united through its national team’s brazen and brilliant ambitions, this is a football game that truly understands football way more than most games featuring football and why it matters. Because sometimes, for 90 minutes or less, we just need a ball to bring us together to where we dream of winning the World Cup, no matter how much of a folly it may be, and forget the realities we face. Whether you like football or not, those ideas are worth breaking through despelote’s occasional imprecisions to appreciate.
