Telltale-style adventures are back: Dispatch has sold more than a million copies in 10 days

Dispatch | Official Launch Trailer - YouTube Dispatch | Official Launch Trailer - YouTube
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When Telltale Games came to a messy end, it seemed like the end of the line for that particular style of episodic modern choice-and-consequence adventure game. In retrospect, Life is Strange looked like a blip, a one-hit wonder whose success wasn't repeated by any of its spin-offs or follow-ups. No amount of editorials about why Telltale mattered could bring those games back.

Adhoc was founded by ex-Telltale staff, and includes writer Pierre Shorette, whose credits are basically a Telltale best-of list that includes Tales from the Borderlands, The Wolf Among Us, The Walking Dead, and Batman: The Telltale Series. Dispatch feels like an evolution of those games rather than a rehash of the formula, though—a superhero workplace comedy about the poor schmuck deciding who gets sent to to negotiate a hostage release and who gets sent to fetch a cat in a tree, it incorporates a management sim minigame where you choose which of your staff of rehabilitation-project supervillains has the right stats to deal with each problem.

I'd love it if they released an endless mode where you can just play the dispatch part of Dispatch forever, but the story is excellent too. It looks like a big-budget animated TV series, and has made me care more about superheroes than any of the movies have for years. If you want to help that sales number go up, Dispatch is available on Steam.

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Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.

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