I’m going to spoil the opening of Despelote here – an opening which I think, as you can probably tell, is pretty glorious. It’s not a spoiler so much as a contaminator, a finger on the scales of something it’ll feel wonderful to go into unweighted. So go away right now if you want to experience it for yourself.
So, Despelote’s opening sequence. There have been other moments that hit me with more force this year – several of those in Despelote itself in fact, later on – but maybe none that some up my love for a game like this one. You begin in a game of football – specifically, video game football, retro video game football, a top-down, Subbuteo-like game on a deeply grainy, black-and-white TV screen, the thunk’s of each kick landing with a kind of analogue fuzz, the ball itself, a white speck, barely visible amongst all the artefacts and grain.
And then, a little match. And then the moment. Some dialogue, on-screen in speech bubbles but coming from off-screen, to the side, your periphery. On-screen not in a deliberate way but a distracting way, like you can’t help but dial in to this conversation happening from all around you, can’t help but read, when you realise it’s you being talked about too, when you’re also trying not to get done over in retro FIFA by Peru. And then the screen moves, and you’re pulling back, gradual and continuous, the screen smaller, more distant, your childhood home pulling into view while the game itself continues in your hands.
It’s a lovely trick. Despelote is a game about childhood life – specifically, the developer’s childhood life – at the height of World Cup fever (really, World Cup Qualifier fever) in Ecuador circa 2001. And this moment then is childhood absorption and hyperfocus in a single movement of a virtual camera – a rare case of a video game making the most of its lack of physical camera, in fact, using the language of camera-based media without the restrictions that come with it. You are out of the TV and into the world, and then – ha – real TV, real football on the screen instead. Real Ecuador, your national side, are playing with actual, archival footage, as your parents do that “parents who don’t know football but watch it when the national team plays” thing and add some charmingly un-specialist commentary of a near miss.
It might not sound like much, but I love this moment so dearly. Despelote is full of these little tricks, barely even tricks, really, if you’re not paying attention. It loves to play with the form, to do a little bait-and-switch with the task at hand, or the boundaries of the world, the structure and rules of the game. It continuously makes rules and breaks them, adopts an unspoken language and switches into another. With every slow pull-back is a message: your childhood world is expanding. Or contracting. Or being all-consuming, in the way those big, childhood moments you can still remember now always seemed to be.
Screens are a recurring theme in Despelote.
Despelote is a game that understands the bigness of life. The way that a football tournament played thousands of miles away is life and death to a child, that awkwardness and rejection at a teenage party is life and death to a teen, that successfully making a game, recording and documenting the truth of a place too rarely shown on screen, of your hometown, probably feels like life and death to a developer on a microscopic budget. Through moments like these, Despelote talks to you about what it means to remember or misremember, to attempt to capture a place as it is or was, to try to do a community justice. It’s inextricable, as a result, from the people who made it, who are doing the remembering and the documenting and, in places, reckoning with their failures or limits in doing so as well. It’s a game that bumps up against the outer boundaries of what games have managed to do so far as a medium, and which shows over and over just what it is they’re capable of in the right hands.
This article is part of our end-of-year series, Games of 2025, where we talk about great moments, great games, and our personal favourites of the year. You can read more in our Games of 2025 hub. Thank you for reading, and happy holidays!
