bajo los edificios - sebastián valbuena (From 'despelote' Soundtrack)
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I think im gonna struggle with putting it into words but I really love this game. I played the demo during a NextFest in the summer and kept thinking about it all year until I eventually caved and bought it in the winter sale. I'm glad I did because it's probably one of my favorite experiences I've had in a video game.
despelote is able to capture an extremely human feeling in a way that no other game i've played has done before. It feels like a glimpse into someone elses memories, giving me nostalgia for events I wasn't there for. They didn't even happen like this!! It's a video game! But I still feel some weird feeling of familiarity with the events from the game. There's no real goal besides existing as a child in ecuador (love games where u dont have a goal) and its grounded by these small moments that remind me of my own childhood. Sitting under the table with my little sister at a family event in some random building, chasing a dog around in the park and drawing in the condensation on the car windows at night are all memories that feel personal to me but they're present here too.
These emotions are really heightened by the excellent voice acting from everyone involved. The performances feels so natural and casual that they just start feeling like real people. This is probably because they are voice acted by the people they're portraying in real life (for the most part from what i saw in the credits), since this is an autobiographical game. The player character's parents are the lead dev's actual parents and all the children are voiced by actual children. It's probably some of my favorite voice work in any game ever and I've never played anything that comes close to replicating it.
The barrier between the player and the developer feels pretty low throughout the entire game, since you're playing a simulated version of his childhood and all, but the veil falls away completely in the later hours. You cut to a photoscan of the real-life park that the game was based on, without the hazy colour filters that have covered the game up until that point. It looks like google maps, just a crude 3D scan of a real place. You walk around here while the dev talks about his experience developing the game, and the issues they ran into. It feels extremely strange and surreal to be suddenly dropped into a sequence like this, but the personal feel of the rest of the game really helps it fit.
I feel like I had alot more to say about this back when I played it in December but I'm struggling to put it into words now. My favorite moment in the game was the very last moment of interaction you have as a player. You're kicking a ball around with your friends (you do this a tonne throughout the game) but you're not kids anymore, you've grown up. You're talking about a party or something as you kick it back and forth. Up until this point in the game, I hadn't been able to score a damn goal despite my best efforts. I sucked at the football minigame (which is super cool by the way) and only ever managed to score and own goal by mistake. As I was playing this sequence where you're kicking the ball back and forth and talking, I decided to kick the ball into a nearby goal, just to get one goal in before the game ended. That kick was my last moment of interaction with the game, and your camera view is shifted to the POV of the football. It felt like one last weird, personalised moment that fit in so perfectly with all the other emotions this game made me feel. also it looks really really nice like wow the colours are so cool and fun
