Julián Cordero and Sebastián Valbuena’s exercise in historic soccer nostalgia is much more than child’s play.

Despelote’s Julián is an eight-year-old Ecuadorian kid itching for class to end so he can focus on something far more important: soccer. Soccer with his friends. Soccer on his game console. Soccer on his living room television, played by an Ecuador team made up of valiant losers. 

It’s 2001 in this first-person narrative adventure based on creator Julián Cordero’s memories of a childhood in Quito, the nation’s capital. Ecuador, still recovering from narrowly-averted financial oblivion, is dreaming of its first-ever World Cup with five games left to qualify – a huge deal for a country which took up powerwalking en mass after an Olympic gold medal in 1996 from the 20km walk. 

You’re in historic times, but the history books never bothered with the events preoccupying Julián in Despelote’s everyday vignettes – set across those five vital matches – with occasional time skips to his later life as a youth player for one of the city’s major clubs. 

As child Julián, let loose on the street unattended for regimented segments of playtime, it doesn’t take long to notice a wonderfully strange phenomenon: traditional game-y activities just make more sense as a kid. 

Standing next to NPCs to overhear conversations about economic woes and hopes of sporting glory. Sprinting across the street to pet every dog and knock over every traffic cone. As adult characters, these actions feel utterly ridiculous. As a child, an agent of chaos in a world of mannered giants, there’s no contradiction between your impatient, absurd hijinks and the patient Quito neighbourhood that mostly tolerates them. 

Say hola to any stranger, one of the game’s few mechanics delivered with a cheery wave, and they’ll greet you back. Who’d blank a child after all? You’re given liberty to exist as a boundary-testing, button-pressing, recklessly lovable rebel. At least until you check the time on your digital watch to find playtime’s long over, your mother impatiently calling you home.

In Julián’s Quito, the sport’s more than a game, or even a lifestyle. It’s woven into the social fabric of his community. Invited to join a game with your classmates, you’ll get to know them in gentle kickarounds. Roll back the right analogue stick and release to angle a pass. Roll it further back for a shot. The ball shares the real object’s slipperiness: you see Julián’s feet dance as they control the ball with light taps, even lunge to regain control when it rolls out of reach. The mechanics are shallow, but that’s not the point. The ball’s a shared fidget spinner, a physical conversation prop, even when playing youth team matches with grander aims than killing time after school.

Then there’s Tino Tini’s Soccer ’99, the cartridge that never leaves Julian’s game console. This top-down arcade game may be an equally shallow affair, feeling like a Game Boy release that can’t compare to FIFA or Pro Evolution, but it’s used to powerful narrative effect. You try to enjoy matches with your friends while your sister teases and blows raspberries. Your mother wants to have a serious discussion, standing in front of the screen while you try to look around her. The role of sport and video games in a child’s home life are captured remarkably well.

If that was all there was to Despelote, it’d be an effective exercise in childhood nostalgia. Fortunately, it’s a lot more complicated than that.

Quito, and the events that happen there, all claim to be real. In some ways, they really are! Levels are made from photographs, colour faded to a mournfully tinted monochrome. Outlines of buildings, the park’s playgrounds, swings, seesaws and football courts, even your living room table, are all converted to level geometry by photogrammetry and populated by black and white comic characters.

Archival footage of the games draws you into the moment, sharing the ups and downs with your family as you all crowd around the screen, or go around your kiddie business while history happens in Bolivia and Colombia – only shared through the newspaper front pages (economic news gets second billing) or electronic stores’ TV displays.

Despelote is the first game I’ve played to have a security guard in the credits. An actual security guard, hired to protect the dev’s expensive sound equipment when recording the ambient sound of a Parque La Carolina that’s become a more dangerous place over the last 24 years.That’s how far it’s devoted to piece together real and found material, a style of impressive verisimilitude more often seen in the visual arts. 

But the way this security guard comes up in the game begins a daring fourth wall-breaking shift. If this is a documentary, it’s one in the midst of an existential crisis.

It’s a memory come to life. But a memory isn’t the past itself, and perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised when Julián turns out to be a less-than-reliable narrator. Who’d be fool enough to trust the word of an eight-year-old? Especially when they grew up to become a game designer who’s clearly fond of The Stanley Parable’s taste for first-person trickery and striking metacommentary?

Towards the end, reality bleeds into a game that starts pulling back the curtain on its own creation. Julián considers his relationship to a past in Quito left behind since moving to New York, a moment now engraved in Ecuadorian history, and how an event can loom so large your own memories mutate into myth.

Despelote brings to mind another famous moment in soccer history. In 1999, Manchester United beat Bayern Munich in the Champion’s League final during injury time – coming from 1-0 down to 2-1 up in three short minutes. After an incomprehensible comeback, United’s exhausted manager, Alex Ferguson, blurted out “Football. Bloody hell!” in a post-match interview.

Where Despelote ends up, after the two hour length of a football match running into extra time, felt just as brave and unexpected. After its final scene, looking up from Quito streets into the night sky after what felt like soccer’s answer to the kinetic tennis matches seen in Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers, all I could do was exhale and say: “Despelote. Bloody hell!”

Score: 8

This review is based on a PC code provided by the publisher.