Before we start, I know a lot of people like this game. Some of them are friends whom I respect deeply. This is not personal. If you like it I love it! I mean, I don’t, I hate it, but I like that you love it. Enjoy it! You’re allowed, and I literally can’t stop you. But I can’t hold this hater energy in my heart any longer. I think **Dispatch**, the new interactive film from former Telltale devs, is one of the worst games to come out in 2025, and I’m tired of pretending like it isn’t. This game’s fanbase has gaslit me into believing it is a thing of quality. It is not. It’s terrible, and if I don’t explain why I will never be sane and my head will explode. > [!Warning] Heads-up > Spoilers for a trash-ass videogame I guess. **Dispatch** is about a uwufied white boy twink[^1] who breaks his rich daddy’s robot and thus has to work at an office where he dispatches a bunch of Z-list former villains on superhero missions. Except it’s not about that all, it’s about picking between your favorite kind of manic pixie dream girl in a mediocre romance visual novel. Will you pick the white girl who immediately falls in love with the twink, despite him having the personality of the toast I ate this morning? Or will you pick the foul-mouthed, angry woman that violates 1000 HR rules[^2] and can literally sexually assault you during the final episode? What’s that? You’re vigorously slamming button 3, wanting to remain single? *LOUD INCORRECT BUZZER!!!* The only way you’re doing that is if you press against the game’s incessent urge to force you into a relationship, requiring you to make so many right choices at right times it’d be enough to make **Valkyrie Profile** blush! The funniest part is that it feels like **Dispatch** isn’t really about anything. Sure, it *attempts* to say something about redemption, but it fails miserably. Is the game about Invisigal, the walking HR violation that wants to redeem herself for hurting the twink a while back? Technically, I guess. But it’s both a weird angle to take given she’s not the protagonist, and it also feels like getting her to redeem herself requires you to agree to fucking her, which…is weird. Why is Blonde Blazer there? Is she a foil to Invisigal’s rough 'n tumble vibes? Is her being so perfect a ruse, to make us believe that Invisigal is the one in the wrong, but it was actually the perfect blonde white woman that’s working for the antagonist? No, that would be interesting. She’s just there to be the other option for the guy who bought this because he heard it wasn’t woke and also is afraid of melanin. She is infallible, and also your boss that you can fuck instead of your employee. “Mint, you’re being needlessly crass!” you say. “I get you don’t like the mediocre visual novel, but do you really gotta say it so gross-like?” Well the game certainly seems to think so, because its cast curses like the writers just learned what “fuck” means a day before they started writing the script. It’s like someone took the last decade of Marvel films and put it in a blender with millennial cat memes. I don’t care if people curse. I say fuck. It’s not a big deal and I’m not a prude. But the reason it makes me want to tear my eyes out in **Dispatch** is because the game seems to be incapable of going two seconds without shoving a curse word in, even if it doesn’t make any sense. It’s that sense of immaturity that hounds every ounce of this game’s storytelling. I could not give less of a fuck about any of these characters by the end, because the game seemed intent on making sure they didn’t care either. Every vulnerable moment is punctuated by a “well, *that* just happened” punch-line, like an 8 hour **Family Guy** episode[^3]. Every fucking impactful fucking line fucking has to fucking be written like this piece of shit fucking ass sentence you just read. I didn’t even know I could stare at my brain with my own eyes before **Dispatch** caused them to roll so hard they got a glimpse of my corpus callosum for the first time. The cast gets absolutely zero time to grow outside of a few scenes with specific ones that don’t even really have conclusions. No one has an arc except for Invisigal, and if you don’t care about her — and the game made *sure* that I didn’t — then you can’t attach to anyone else. Why is Flambe such a dick? What does Prism think about her status as both a pop star and a villain? Why is Golem voiced by a white guy doing AAVE? The game’ll never tell you! :) > [!note] I dunno where else to put this > This game’s music is fucking terrible. Just horrific. The licensed stuff is fine — Thot Patrol might be the only beneficial thing I take away from this slop — but the ambient tracks are grating, repetitive, and boring. They impressively manage to get in the way and be completely forgettable at the same time. I’ve never been so actively turned *off* by a game’s soundtrack before. I think it actually gave me a migraine during episode 4. You may have noticed I haven’t spoken about the dispatch part of the game. There’s nothing to really say. Because the game is secretly a romance visual novel, the dispatching is relatively bereft of depth. I saw someone say they wished it had an endless mode. Hey bud — you good? There’s not much in the way of interesting decision making, no skeleton to build a more in-depth system of dispatching. I thought the game would be more about making hard choices about who to send out on missions, who to sacrifice and keep safe, and balancing that all with the feelings of the team. It’s none of those things. It didn’t *have* to be those things. But it didn’t have to be what we got, either. It barely matters who gets sent on dispatches other than Invisigal — depending what you do with her, you can get locked out of her good ending. Even if you *do* fuck her! I know, right? Talk about disrespectful. Also, because the ending is so bad and completely devoid of stakes that you could argue the “bad” ending is actually her best route! Thank you video game, very cool! **Dispatch** has an overwhelmingly positive rating on Steam. Destructoid, or what’s left of it at least, called it “the best-written game of the year,” in a year where games like [[Clair Obscur - Expedition 33]] exist. PC Gamer declared it to be “one of the best superhero TV shows around.” Folks. What are we doing here? Am I being gaslit? Is there a gas-*leak*? I need to understand what planet this game can be seen as anything but **Invincible** for people who found that to be too mature. I haven’t felt this embarrassed to consider myself someone who thinks critically of media since **Bioshock Infinite** came out. I yearn for the cultural zeitgeist to wake up from its mass delusion and recognizing that you can respect yourself and consume literally anything else of more substance. I love me some slop, but I don’t hate myself enough for this, and you shouldn’t either. [^1]: they refer to this guy as being jacked and having a dad bod. Ignoring the fact that you can’t really be both at the same time, he’s also neither. Robert’s waist is more snatched than tramp-stamp Leon. It’s embarrassing how much they want us to believe he's a heartthrob. He looks like my roommate that never combed his hair and clogged our fucking shower drain, then tried to say that my bald-ass head was the real culprit. fuck you nate [^2]: except they joke about it in the game, so it’s fine and doesn’t need to be addressed of course! [^3]: for anyone wondering, “8 hour family guy episode” is what I picture hell will be like for me when I die and inevitably land there