Indie games often reflect the lives of their creators in profound and meaningful ways, but few share these with players quite like Despelote. It’s an impressive feat — you may not anticipate that a Spanish-language story centered on turn-of-the-millennium Ecuadorian soccer would resonate so easily.
Despelote is the brainchild of Julián Cordero, who grew up in Quito during the early 2000s. Just a few years after speedwalker Jefferson Pérez won Ecuador’s first Olympic gold medal at Atlanta — sparking immense national pride — the national soccer team qualified for their first World Cup in Korea and Japan. Despelote tells the story of Cordero’s memories of the five games leading up to that groundbreaking achievement, and it’s spellbinding.
You shouldn’t expect a rollercoaster ride based on an eye-opening personal tale. It’s much more than that: Despelote is a window into a world you likely know nothing about and portrays it with style and substance, connecting with you on such simple levels that Proustian rushes are part and parcel of the experience — and it’s jaw-dropping when it matters the most.
Hazy days
First things first: Despelote’s art direction is a marvel. Director Sebastián Valbuena combines a Schim-style, two-tone base color scheme with a shifting dead-pixel veneer, overlaying 3D models with a hazy sheen to create the perfect feeling of blurry memories. The only clear recollections are picked out in black and white: your family, friends, teachers, posters, movie boxes, and, most importantly, soccer balls.
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Despelote opens with a top-down, fourth-gen-like soccer videogame. What appears to be a tutorial for this game-within-a-game teaches you the wider experience’s right-stick flick mechanic, which you use to kick things. You’re eventually dragged back into the 3D world of Cordero’s memories when your parents interrupt your gaming session to put Ecuador on the TV, as they beat Peru 2-1 in the dying seconds of World Cup qualifying.
What follows are four more separate experiences based on the remaining game days en route to the World Cup, which are introduced with scene-setting memories, such as school, a party, or a babysitter, before you’re let loose in your park-centric neighborhood, filled with little discoveries and interactions. Across five acts, you’re given a reason to explore, solve problems and, most importantly, dick around with a soccer ball (or bottle, or balloon). Pass it around, annoy a resident, whatever — just make sure you’re back on time. You won’t be, of course, but that’s more or less baked into the story.
The niceties of normality
In these opening moments, and throughout the freer sections, conversations are charmingly recognizable in their banality: your dad discussing the effects of altitude in competitive soccer; your mum’s sweet yet half-hearted interest in the match; your friend’s claims about how great he is at soccer; local fans, watching the game through a shop window, pondering tactics.
All the while, Cordero’s relaxed narration pulls these seemingly unremarkable moments together. He initially comes across as reserved, bordering on unenthused, as if he’s in a Wes Anderson movie. Within minutes, this emerges as one of Despelote’s greatest strengths. Cordero is letting you into his world by talking to you like a friend, sharing his life with the same tone and sentiment as we tell others about our own. Not every story is thrilling, but that doesn’t make them any less enjoyable.
Passing conversations and chapter openings soon help you become aware of this very particular era of Ecuadorian history, from hyperinflation and rolling blackouts to wild stories such as a soccer coach getting shot in the leg for leaving the president’s son out of the squad. These are treated matter-of-factly and as important context, but remain firmly in the background. You play as a young Cordero, after all, and he didn’t exactly understand the deeper issues back then, either.
To explain the narrative any more would do it a disservice and spoil the game itself, but Despelote wastes no opportunity to let you appreciate the human condition, especially childhood. Its final act has one of the most memorable moments I think I’ve ever experienced in a game; again, with no spoilers, Cordero cleverly lifts the lid and makes it all the more personal. In turn, he manages to do real justice to the inspirational figures who didn’t just shape his life, but also the wider fortunes and aspirations of Ecuador.
As a fan of an obscure and down-on-its-luck English soccer team, which had its greatest yet still meager successes around 20 years ago, Despelote is surprisingly emotional. Still, we all have passions or occasions that aren’t sport-related that keep old memories alive; as you get older, you cherish them, because you forget more and more of the things you loved — or just did out of boredom — as a kid.
In some ways, Despelote’s journey is better than the destination, which is fitting, given that the same can be said about the Ecuador national team in the 2002 World Cup. That’s not to say it’s without the occasional misstep — controls are fiddly at the best of times, and I got lost in one section due to a directional audio issue that kept leading me in the wrong direction. Both are easily fixed.
In just two hours, Cordero’s heartfelt personal story, complemented by Valbuena’s gorgeous art direction, the realistic sounds of Quito, and the down-to-earth narration that Cordero provides, perfectly encapsulates some of the most primal emotions and formative experiences all of us had while growing up — even if it’s just kicking a ball around with your mates, talking nonsense.
