(Image credit: Adhoc Studio)

Sometimes the calls routed to my desk at the Superhero Dispatch Network are pretty low-key. Cats stuck up trees, that kind of thing. Sometimes they’re more high-stress, like hostage negotiations. And sometimes they can go either way, like when someone hears strange noises in the basement and thinks they’re being haunted.

This is a world where one of my team is an alien and another is a demon. Maybe ghosts are real too? I’d hate to write off someone who turns out to have Sadako in their cellar.

Dispatch is an adventure game whose creators include a bunch of ex-Telltale staff, so like The Walking Dead one of the main ways it adds interactivity is with choice and consequence. Which superhero do you go on a date with? Who do you drop from the team? But where Telltale games also retained rudimentary walk-around-and-look-at-stuff scenes from their point-and-click ancestors like vestigial limbs, Dispatch ditches them in favor of being more like an interactive cartoon—with high-quality animation and acting—until suddenly it drops you into a shift working as a dispatcher. At which point a miniature management sim falls in your lap.

Each of the heroes has stats—technically they’re reformed villains doing community service, but I think of them as heroes for the sake of morale—and each job comes with clues suggesting which stats will be important. The haunted house notes it’ll require investigating the noises and reassuring the homeowner, which means I want to send heroes with high Intellect and high Charisma. Unfortunately I only have one hero with high Intellect and he’s currently transformed into a bat, boosting his Combat ability at the cost of his brains.

Instead, I send my high Charisma hero Prism, a kind of modern-day Dazzler if she was less disco and more Megan Thee Stallion. For backup I throw in Golem, who is literally a golem. He’s not particularly smart, but he is available, and I need to test out unusual combos to learn which characters have synergy—a hidden stat that boosts their chance of success when they work together.

(Image credit: Adhoc Studio)

Normally Dispatch gives you a percentage chance of succeeding then rolls the dice, but some missions have a choose-your-own-adventure element. This one has a greyed-out option that I could have chosen if I sent Malevola—a cross between Hellboy and Magik from the X-Men whose supernatural powers would have come in handy.

Since I didn’t send her I have to pick between calming the homeowner or investigating the pipes, and I opt for the former since I know Charisma is my best stat. That turns out to be a good choice and I pass the test, earning some XP for the two heroes I sent. Though now that’s two more of my squad who need to rest before being sent out again, and my screen’s full of missions with timers ticking down.

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While I’m totally hooked on the story of Dispatch six episodes into its eight-episode run, and desperate to see how things play out—whether Phenomaman will pull himself together, if things will work out between me and Invisigal—every time the plot pauses to sit me down in front of an ancient computer terminal and decide who gets sent to clean up a sewage spill on the beach, I lean forward in my chair. I’d love a standalone version, kind of like the school mode in Danganronpa, that lets me continue to work shifts at the office long after the story ends.

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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