After almost a year of journeying between platforms, AdHoc’s episodic narrative Dispatch will finally arrive on XBOX this month. The studio initially only released the game for PC and PlayStation, and after porting it to Switch (with a lot of drama around its censorship), it’s at last making its way to Microsoft’s gaming platform.
As AdHoc announced today, Dispatch is officially moving into XBOX, slated for a July 29 release date. This will conclude the game’s platform odyssey and make it available to any gamer on any platform, including PC, PlayStation, Switch, and XBOX. The narrative is in many ways even purpose-built for consoles and, though I myself happened to beat it on PC, I would not have minded to kick back in my bed and play it on the big TV.
The cast of Dispatch will also be attending the San Diego Comic-Con, discussing the game and what it meant for them, while I just cannot shake the feeling that this increased level of attention to the game will lead us into a potential sequel announcement. Talks of a Dispatch 2 or Season 2 have been running rampant ever since the game came out, but alas, there hasn’t been any sort of official confirmation of when it’s going to come or how it’s gonna look.
At any rate, Destructoid gave Dispatch an 8.5, praising its story but criticizing its pacing a little. I called it “the best-written game of all time,” and I firmly stand by that, even though I’ve come to understand that Disco Elysium also exists and has, in several ways, better writing than the former. The overall narrative, the cast of characters, and the relationships forming between them as reflections of your choices as a player still remain the pinnacle of this type of storytelling, and I urge you to give it a try if you haven’t yet.
