🎮 Played through Episodes 2 and 3 yesterday.

When I first played a Telltale game about 10 years ago, I was surprised and disappointed at how the game ‘plays itself’; one long cutscene with quicktime events. But then it clicked: this isn’t a game, it’s an interactive TV show, and the second I took it on those terms it became an incredible experience.

Dispatch — a collaboration between Telltale veterans and the tabletop-improv juggernaughts at Critical Role — takes that ethos and does something even better with it. It keeps its gameplay sequences simple, but they’re also strategic, thoughtful, and filled with the life of the narrative. The character development keeps coming thick and fast throughout, and the interactivity increases the sense of stakes severalfold. Each of the shift sequences has unique parameters and gimmicks, like (pretty early in the story) the characters you send out together sabotaging each other mid-travel in order to climb the ladder — which has the added bonus of removing the sabotaged hero and their abilities from the mission’s success roll.

In short: this is already a masterclass in the intersection between TV and gaming as storytelling formats, and I’m not even halfway into it yet. Rumour has it that they’re working on a Season 2, so it only gets better.