I'm going to spoil the beginning of “Despelote” here – an opening that, as you can probably guess, I think is pretty great. It's not so much a spoiler as it is a contaminant, a finger on the scale of something that would be a pleasure to step into without weighing it. So leave now if you want to experience it for yourself.
So, the introductory part of Despelot. There were other moments that struck me more forcefully this year – a few of them later in Despelote itself – but perhaps none of them influenced my love for a game like this. You start out playing football – specifically, video game football, retro video game style football, played top down, Subbuteo style, on a deeply grainy black and white TV screen, hitting each landing with a sort of analog fuzz, the ball itself a white speck, barely noticeable among all the artifacts and grain.
And then a little match. And this is the moment. Some dialogue on the screen in the form of speech bubbles, but coming from behind the screen, to the side, in your periphery. The screen is not intentional, but distracting, as if you can’t help but connect to this conversation happening around you, can’t help but read when you realize that they’re talking about you too, when you’re also trying not to end up in retro FIFA from Peru. And then the screen moves and you step back, gradually and continuously, the screen gets smaller, further away, your childhood home comes into view, and the game itself continues in your hands.
This is a great trick. Despelote is a game about the life of a child—specifically, the childhood life of the developer—at the height of World Cup fever (actually World Cup qualifying fever) in Ecuador circa 2001. And this moment of childlike absorption and hyperfocus in a single virtual camera movement is a rare case where a video game makes the most of the absence of a physical camera, effectively using the language of camera media without the limitations that come with it. You step out of the TV and into the world, and then – ha – instead there is real television on the screen, real football. Real Ecuador, your national team, plays with real archival footage, while your parents do that “parents who don't know football but watch it when the national team plays” thing and add charming lay commentary about the miss.
It may not sound like much, but I really love this moment. Despelote is full of little tricks like this, not even tricks if you don't pay attention. He likes to play with form, slightly substituting the task at hand or the boundaries of the world, the structure and rules of the game. He constantly makes rules and breaks them, learns an unspoken language and switches to another. Each slow retreat is a message: the world of your childhood is expanding. Or enter into a contract. Or be as all-consuming as those big childhood moments you can still remember now always seemed to be.
Screens are a recurring theme in Despelote.
Despelote is a game that understands the enormity of life. How a soccer tournament is played thousands of miles away is life and death for a child, that awkwardness and rejection at a teen party is life and death for a teenager, that successfully creating a game, recording and documenting the truth about a place that is too rarely seen on screen, your hometown, probably feels like life and death for a developer on a microscopic budget. In moments like these, Despelote tells you about what it means to remember or misremember, to try to capture a place as it is or was, to try to do justice to society. As a result, it is inseparable from the people who created it, who remember and document it, and in places also consider their failures or limitations in doing so. This is a game that pushes the limits of what games have so far managed to do as a medium, and that shows time and time again what they are capable of in the right hands.
This article is part of our final series, Games of 2025, where we highlight great moments, great games, and our personal favorites of the year. You can read more in our Hub “Games 2025”. Thanks for reading and happy holidays!
