Tag: gaming

Dispatch Review: HR’s Having a Heart Attack.

2025 has been a spectacular year for indie gaming.
Games from smaller studios like Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 captured the attention and hearts of gamers everywhere.
Clair Obscur (deservedly) won Game of the Year, so that is proof enough.
One of the games released by a smaller studio later in the year was Dispatch, a superhero comedy in the vein of Telltale.
This description was enough to sell me on it and, after completing my first playthrough, I can say it is well worth the money. 

I highly recommend this game is you are a Telltale fan.

Dispatch follows Robert Robertson The Third (Yes, that is his actual name), the superhero Mecha-Man.
After his suit is destroyed, Robert is left driftless, until superheroes Blonde Blazer (Erin Yvette) and Track Star (Jeffrey Wright) come to him with an offer: Work as a dispatch worker, coordinating a team of former super villains turned heroes, and they will help him rebuild his suit. 
And so, Robert has to work to transform the Z-Team from a group of combative, squabbling children, into heroes the public can trust.

The Z Team are all great characters, but the HR Department’s worst nightmare.

Each of the characters you dispatch are interesting in their own way, from the Crypto-Man-Bat, Sonar (MoistCri1tiKaL), to shortie Irishman, Punch Up (Jacksepticeye), to the rebel Invisigal (Laura Bailey).
The latter in particular takes center stage, with the player’s decisions determining how Robert’s relationships with both her and Blonde Blazer progresses.
All of the performances for these characters are great, especially Aaron Paul’s as Robert.
Usually whenever I hear him in a voice-acting role, I associate his character with the actor.
For Robert, however, he felt completely his own person, showing how good of a job Aaron Paul did for this game from the serious moments to the humorous ones.
Speaking of the humor, this game can be incredibly funny, and I broke out into laughter multiple times.
Probably one of my favourite jokes was delivered by Prism (Thot Squad) in a bar fight.

The bar fight has many great gags.

But enough about the characters, what about the choices?
Dispatch does have quite a few after, all.
Well, overall, the story does not change too drastically.
The current end point of a few characters changes depending on your choices, along with who Robert decides to romance but, otherwise, the storyline is generally the same.
That being said, the quality of the story more than makes up for it.
One thing Dispatch has over Telltale though is its gameplay.
Dispatch’s is strategy based, with you sending different combinations of heroes on different missions and then leveling their stats with their successes while learning from their failures.
After Episode One, I thought this would make the gameplay a bit of a chore, but Dispatch quickly proved me wrong.
The banter between the characters, the time limits to send characters on missions, the suspense over whether I had made the right choices, and even the sheer randomness of outcomes created a lot of fun moments, even if I did a really good job one episode and a terrible one the next. 

Who knew dispatching heroes could be this fun?

All in all, Dispatch is a great time.
The story is fun and often hilarious, the choices, while not incredibly impactful, are cool to see play out in the moment, and the gameplay is engaging.
I really hope we get a Season Two because I want to see the continuation of Robert’s story, alongside his dispatch team. 

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Review: A Stunning Exploration of Grief.

All of us, in some way, have experienced grief.
Whether it be over the loss of a family member or friend, grief is part of the human experience.
There are many ways we can deal with this grief, both healthy and unhealthy.
Yet, I have not seen a video game explore the concept in such a profound way before as Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.
With many AAA games falling below the mark recently, AA studios have risen to the challenge to fill in the quality gap.
Directed by Guillaume Broche. Expedition 33 is the latest video game to fill in that gap. 

The world will have truly gone mad if this game is at least not nominated for Game of the Year.

Set in an alternate universe, the island of Lumière is facing certain oblivion.
Every year, a mysterious gigantic figure, known as the Paintress, paints a number upon her monolith.
The people that age then disappear in an event known as the Gommage.
With the Paintress counting down, it will not be long before everyone in Lumière has passed on   
And so, every year, a group of expeditioners are sent out to kill the Paintress, so that the people of Lumière can hope to grow old again. 
The game follows, you guessed it, Expedition 33 on this mission.

“She’ll never paint again,” a character states, perfectly summarizing many of the character’s goals.

On the journey is our main character Gustave (Charlie Cox), his adopted sister Maelle (Jennifer English), the intelligent Lune (Kirsty Rider), and the optimist Sciel (Shala Nyx).
They are also joined by a mysterious former Expeditioner named Verso (Ben Starr), his hilarious friend Monoco (Rich Kebble), and the giant friendly creature known as Esquie (Maxence Cazorla).
Together, the seven travel across the land, befriending Gestrels and fighting Nevrons in numerous fantastic battles. 
Expedition 33 is a turn-based game, and it is already one of the best in the genre if you ask me.
Every character feels unique to use with their various different skillsets.
Not only that, but the dodge and parry mechanics are riveting.
There is a lot of challenge in getting the timing down for certain bosses strikes but, when you can parry an eight-hit attack you feel like a god.

It feels very similar to the boss fights of Elden Ring, in that way.

Speaking of the bosses, they are all mostly excellent, as are the soundtracks accompanying them.
This is made all the more impressive by the fact that the game’s composer, Lorien Testard, had never worked on a video game before.
This is a common theme with Expedition 33.
Many of its developers are newbies to the industry, with a lot of them having been discovered by complete chance.
This makes the existence of Expedition 33 nothing short of a miracle, and I would highly encourage you to look into the history of the game just to see how it all came to be. 
Much like the composer, the game’s main writer, Jennifer Svedberg-Yen, had also never written for a video game, and this makes the excellence of her writing all the more inspiring.
The reveal of why the Paintress does what she does is excellent and perfectly set up throughout the narrative.
That narrative also does a fantastic job of building up the characters, especially Maelle and Verso, who are already among some of the most morally complex characters in video games.

I am going to remember Maelle’s journey for a while.

And then there are the themes.
As I stated at the beginning of this review, Expedition 33 is a game that centers around grief and what it can drive people to.
This results in multiple emotional moments, the standout of which is the ending.
No spoilers here, but it had me questioning the morality of characters in such a way that I have not experienced since the ending of the original Last of Us. 
It is an ending I have already seen multiple debates about online, arguing over which character, if any, made the right decision. 

Expedition 33‘s conclusion really makes you think.

As of right now, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is my game of the year. 
The gameplay is enthralling, the music is spectacular, and the writing delivers an emotional and beautiful message about grief.
I cannot wait to see what Sandfall Interactive does next in the gaming world.
If their future titles are anything like Expedition 33, we may have another legendary studio on our hands.