i played Despelote

this is a quick recommendation post for Despelote. it's a videogame, it lasts about 2 hours, it is, in my opinion, worth playing!

it's a personal documentary game about the creator, Julián Cordero, when he was a kid in Ecuador, and the period where Ecuador were in the qualifiers for the World Cup for the first time.

okay, now i'm gonna talk about some stuff that's best experienced for yourself, so... go play it, stop reading this.

there's some incredible transitions in this game. i think the strongest part of the game is the transitions, in fact? not to do down the experience of being a kid, kicking a ball with friends, overhearing conversations in the park, just generally having slack time and trying to find good ways of wasting it. that stuff is super strong, too. but the transitions!!

so, the game starts with a game. it's a simple top down football game, it works like Fifa or something. your consciousness passes between players as you pass and shoot and run up and down the pitch. you're a little pale dot against little dark dots. you learn the controls, here's how to move, here's how to kick the ball by flicking the stick, draw back before for extra power. shoulder trigger to run. okay, got it. and then you start to hear a conversation. it's in Spanish, and there are subtitles, so your eyes keep getting drawn from the football match to the subtitles on each side. the screen starts drawing away from you as you're focusing on it, also trying to read the subtitles... it starts getting harder and harder to play as the distractions increase and the screen gets smaller. slowly the scene around the TV fades in, it's your parents talking about how you're always on that game. but that, actually, right now, Ecuador are playing, and you'd probably want to watch that. it's almost impossible to play now, but you're still trying, and then they come and stand in front and turn it off. the outrage!! but then they turn it over to Ecuador playing - it's real footage, but in the in-game style, and you find pretty immediately that you're captivated by this. and clearly the boy you're playing finds this too, because pretty soon the TV screen is zooming in, the rest of the room starts to fade out.

what a bravura opening!! the way it layers the player & the character, establishing sympathy between them but also exploiting the way that their interests differ (for the typical player, of course you're fascinated by the parent's conversation - for the kid, of course your parents chatting is not nearly so interesting). that interplay between being the dot-footballer, and the boy sitting on the sofa playing. the way it shifts perspective seamlessly (only to hard cut at the end of this sequence). it's in control of what it's doing, and it's happy to do things that are difficult and expensive in order to achieve the artistic goals it's aiming for.

and that's not even the transition in the game that i'm left most thinking about.