**Superhero Narrative Romp *Dispatch* Is Doing Episodic Right**
Judging by the two episodes I’ve played so far, *Dispatch* is rad. It’s an evolution of the Telltale style—from Telltale vets, unsurprisingly—that tightens up the format and shakes off some cobwebs. It feels much more like an interactive TV show than I’m used to, pushing you swiftly from one scene to the next without letting you loiter or explore. This approach gives it an appropriately brisk pace and kinetic energy that I find pretty damn refreshing.
However, when I realized it was going to be an episodic release, I scoffed. An episodic game? In the year of our lord 2025? Back in the 2010s, when Telltale started releasing their games episodically, it was novel. It was also before streamers took over TV and dropped entire seasons on us instantly. Though streamers have started reverting to traditional release schedules, it still seemed wrong to have to wait to enjoy more of a game. The game is finished. It’s ready. Why can’t I just devour the whole thing?
My impatience was even more overt after finishing the first episode, *Pivot*, which is 100% setup and only briefly lets you experience its most notable novelty. You play as Mecha Man, AKA Robert Robertson—a superhero with a mech suit that’s now totaled. In *Pivot*, drowning your sorrows in a bar, you’re offered a new gig: become a superhero dispatcher, managing a group of heroes and sending them out on missions while you sit at your desk.
It’s a fun system, but one you barely get any time with before the credits roll. After about 50 minutes, I was done with the first episode. So it’s a good thing that AdHoc Studio is releasing two episodes at a time.
The second episode, *Onboard*, is much stronger. It gives you a full shift as a dispatcher, and it’s a much meatier episode overall. By the end, I didn’t feel like I’d been given the boot before I’d had my fun.
What was really surprising, though, was that I didn’t feel compelled to immediately play the third episode. Reviewers have been given four out of eight episodes, but the rest of us will have to wait.
As my brain starts to adjust to TV shows releasing weekly again, I find myself seeing the value in pacing. I want to wait for everyone else to play the first two episodes so we can chat about them before I dive back in. I want to have a new episode to look forward to, to sit with what happened in the last one, and to make predictions about where things are heading.
I find myself wanting to savor the experience, but also not get too far ahead only to wait even longer for my fix. And it just feels right—more so than in Telltale’s episodic games, especially the early ones, which were still trying to be adventure games rather than fully embracing the interactive TV show idea.
Maybe it just feels more earned this time around? This is a creative choice made to fit the style of the game, rather than a practical one that players don’t care about. Telltale didn’t create each series all at once; they worked on episodes sequentially, which led to long waits. For example, after the premiere of *The Walking Dead: A New Day*, we had to wait more than two months for the second episode, *Starved for Help*. Sometimes the wait was even longer.
The first season of *Dispatch*, meanwhile, will be over in a month. We’re getting two episodes a week for four weeks. It’s paced like a TV show, and releasing with the cadence of one. Each two-episode drop will still be fresh in our minds when the next ones appear.
While you’re enjoying them, spare a thought for those of us who played the second episode of *The Walking Dead: The Final Season* in September 2018, then had to wait until 2019 to play the third. We got four episodes, but it took more than seven months.
With *Dispatch*, it feels like we’re seeing how episodic interactive TV shows should work and be released. I think a lot of the negativity around episodic deals stems from how poorly they’ve been handled in the past.
*Dispatch* is doing it right.
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/adventure/dispatchs-superheroic-efforts-have-changed-my-mind-about-its-episodic-release-schedule/