When Telltale Games came to a messy end, it seemed like the end of the line for that particular style of episodic modern choice-and-consequence adventure game. In retrospect, Life is Strange looked like a blip, a one-hit wonder whose success wasn't repeated by any of its spin-offs or follow-ups. No amount of editorials about why Telltale mattered could bring those games back.
Which is why it's a pleasant surprise to see that Dispatch has done so well. Its developer, Adhoc Studio, just posted that it's sold over a million copies in 10 days, and it's not even done yet, with the final two episodes of its six-episode run due out on Wednesday at 9 am PST.
Adhoc was founded by ex-Telltale staff, and includes writer Pierre Shorette, whose credits are basically a Telltale best-of list that includes Tales from the Borderlands, The Wolf Among Us, The Walking Dead, and Batman: The Telltale Series. Dispatch feels like an evolution of those games rather than a rehash of the formula, though—a superhero workplace comedy about the poor schmuck deciding who gets sent to to negotiate a hostage release and who gets sent to fetch a cat in a tree, it incorporates a management sim minigame where you choose which of your staff of rehabilitation-project supervillains has the right stats to deal with each problem.
I'd love it if they released an endless mode where you can just play the dispatch part of Dispatch forever, but the story is excellent too. It looks like a big-budget animated TV series, and has made me care more about superheroes than any of the movies have for years. If you want to help that sales number go up, Dispatch is available on Steam.
