I don’t play many sports games (we can’t all be Luke) but I’m always intrigued by a game that does something more than just recreate a sport’s mechanics. Soccer game Despelote, out today, captures both the physical and emotional side of the game from the perspective of a young fan.
I first played a version of Despelote years ago at the NYU Game Center, where its unique look stuck with me. The game is in first person, with key objects and characters rendered in line drawings over photographs of its location of Quito, Ecuador. Its story is a fictionalized version of the childhood of its creator, Julián Cordero, who is eight years old in the early 2000s. Ecuador’s soccer team is vying to qualify for the World Cup, and Julián, like the rest of the country, is obsessed. The sport provides a distraction and sense of hope from the country’s political and financial upheaval; as you wander Quito, you can overhear adults swapping between these topics in realistic, meandering conversations.
Despelote wonderfully captures the sense of being a child in a world of adults. Distractions are everywhere: the game’s opening tutorializes its mechanics by having you play a soccer video game, while a conversation with Julián’s parents slowly filters in. I found myself trying to split my attention, only to mostly miss what his parents were saying thanks to the draw of the in-game game. Throughout the story, Julián’s attention drifts to soccer: matches on in-world TVs, his friends kicking a ball around outside his classroom, the video game in the family’s living room. Many of the game’s scenes involve an adult telling Julián to sit still or come home at a certain time, only for him to get distracted by the city, its residents, or a soccer ball.
The first-person soccer mechanic lets you dribble and kick with different intensities. There are a few more structured matches, but mostly you just run around with a ball. This casual play inspires you to explore Quito, as you look for things to kick a ball against or open spaces to play. With only the occasional pressure to do something specific with the ball or score a goal, you instead just get to just have fun with it, creating your own little games or just passing the ball back and forth. The city is a place to play soccer in, and this again makes the world feel like a backdrop to your youthful interest, while still pushing you to engage with the setting and story.
That story is loose and meandering, more of a feeling than a narrative. But anxiety and hope are everywhere, alongside the creeping pressure of the country’s political situation and of growing older within it. In one conversation with Julián’s mother at a teenage party, she asks about the soccer league you’re on or if your knee is bothering you; this felt like growth, turning Julián’s hobby into something more, but also like a loss of the freedom of his younger years. As we talked, I was suddenly struck by the fact that I was taller than his mother, when I’d spent so much of the game in a child’s waist-high perspective or following behind her as she tugged my hand.
Throughout the game, the constancy of soccer stands against all the change that swirls around Julián. Sometimes it’s a comfort, sometimes a pressure, and sometimes just something joyful. But it always stays true to the core of just being people and a ball, a space for both the game’s characters and the player to make their own meaning.
Despelote is out today for PlayStation, Xbox, and PC, with Switch coming later.
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