One of the great magic tricks of art — or perhaps just of the human brain — is the ability to transmute something hyper-specific and personal into something universal. Despelote is an autobiographical, semi-documentary game about being a kid in Ecuador during the country’s first successful qualifying run for the 2002 World Cup. It’s also just a game about the totality of being a kid: the play, the boredom, the obsession, the myth-making, the outsiders’ view of the adult world, and the way that adult world informs everything about who you are. It’s really beautiful.
Despelote is by Julián Cordero and Sebastian Valbuena. It’s based on Cordero’s childhood in Ecuador’s capital city, Quito, and his intense relationship — much of the country’s intense relationship, at the time — with soccer (which, for the rest of this article, I’ll call football, like the rest of the world outside of the U.S. does). It’s a memory piece, then — but memory is a tricky thing. Late in the game, Cordero admits in a voiceover that Ecuador’s successful qualification for the World Cup is his first memory, from when he was four. His memory of it is vivid, but he wishes it was more expansive — so, in the game, he’s eight. Despelote is the memory he wishes he had.
Nonetheless, it’s communicated with an authenticity and detail that is completely immersive. Despelote is a short, deceptively simple first-person narrative game that takes a couple of hours to play. (It’s available now on Steam, Xbox, and PlayStation, with a Switch version coming soon.) As Julián, you roam your family home, the school, and the local park, kicking a ball around with your friends. You attend a wedding, punting balloons at the ceiling fans; you eavesdrop on your parents’ conversations; you play hide-and-seek with your sister. Your mom drags you places, sends you out, orders you home, asks you to stay put.
Image: Julián Cordero, Sebastian Valbuena/Panic
It’s the late summer of 2001 and the whole of Quito is obsessed with Ecuador’s series of qualifying matches against other South American nations. Julián’s memory hops from one match to the next, but rather than being the focus of the action, the matches are an ever-present context that hums in the atmosphere of the city; video footage plays on TVs in shop windows while grown-ups everywhere discuss the strategy and the scoreline.
As a kid, Julián’s relationship with the sport of football is more tactile. He kicks. Cordero and Valbuena have designed a sensationally fluid and intuitive first-person footballing control scheme, with dribbling that is automatic but still requires finesse (especially when running with R2), and kicks delivered by holding and flicking the right stick. The system works just as well in the top-down football video game that Julián plays on his console at home, Tino Tini’s Soccer 99 (an homage to the 1993 Britsoft classic Dino Dini’s Soccer). This extremely playable and fun game within a game is stunningly deployed in a series of slow but arresting perspective shifts that ambiguously blur the lines between author, player, and avatar. As Tino Tini’s Soccer eats into young Julián’s life, so Despelote, a game an older Julián made about his life, eats into ours.
Despite the game’s tiny scope and budget, its rendition of 2001 Quito feels enveloping and fully realized. Visually, it’s composed of low-poly 3D models rendered in a grainy, pastel monochrome, like a zine print, with simply but vividly cartooned 2D black-and-white figures representing people and important things. It’s like a hazy photograph superimposed with a child’s understanding of what’s important. Brilliant audio design draws you deeper into this world, building the city up as a wash of ambient noise and layers of overlapping dialogue about life in Ecuador as it faces both financial catastrophe and a shot at sporting glory. The result is impressionistic, but also genuinely realist — as in, grounded in the reality of our world — in a way few video games can achieve. Playing it, you feel as if you’ve been transported to a different time and place.
Image: Julián Cordero, Sebastian Valbuena/Panic
That’s not to say that Despelote stays in the same time and place, either. Like some of its snappy narrative indie forebears — particularly Blendo Games’ jump-cutting mini masterpiece, Thirty Flights of Loving — Despelote deploys cinematic editing and juxtaposition to great effect. (Cinema is in Cordero’s blood; his father Sebastián directed the 1999 crime film Ratas, Ratones, Rateros that was the first Ecuadorian movie to get recognition at international film festivals. His parents can be heard chatting about the state of Ecuadorian film in the game.) Occasionally, the game jumps forward in time to the experiences of a more rootless teenage Julián; later, Despelote smashes down the fourth wall to take a documentary look at the mechanics of its own making.
So yes, among other things, Despelote is a meditation on the creative process, a remembered documentary on life in turn-of-the-millennium Ecuador, and a playable essay on the way sport connects to both individuals and societies. Above all that, though, it’s a game about being a kid, kicking a ball, and watching it sail into the future. It’s a marvel.