Despelote takes a bold step forward for documentary storytelling

This audio-visual sandbox lets players explore a specific moment in the past with a soccer ball underfoot.

By Elijah Gonzalez | January 6, 2026 | 2:00pm

Photo courtesy of Julián Cordero and Sebastian Valbuena

Games Features despelote

Despelote takes a bold step forward for documentary storytelling

2025 gave us no shortage of big, showy games with immediately apparent appeal: Death Stranding 2 was larger and weirder than its predecessor, Donkey Kong Bonanza let us punch to the center of the planet, and Clair Obscur reminded those who don’t regularly play turn-based RPGs that turn-based RPGs can actually be pretty good. And although they all made our list of the year’s best games, none of them came in at number one. That honor went to a game that’s noticeably more subdued, a rare break from action spectacle and genre fiction that captivated through a much more grounded approach: “a soccer game about people,” as its tagline puts it.

Despelote was developed by Julián Cordero and Sebastian Valbuena and takes place in Quito, Ecuador, during the country’s Cinderella run in the 2002 World Cup qualifiers. Portrayed from Cordero’s perspective during his childhood, you witness digitally reconstructed neighborhoods and dreamlike memories, as narration fills in the details about the country’s national team and its progress in the qualifying bracket. There isn’t a clear objective beyond soaking in as much of the ambient storytelling as you can. You explore and listen in on incidental conversations about exceedingly specific topics, like what movies are expected at the Corderos’ DVD rental store, or spend an afternoon kicking a ball with other local kids. This comes across in a series of loosely connected vignettes that sometimes jump-cut ahead in Cordero’s life before returning to 2002.

Despelote is game as autobiography, juxtaposing candid recreations of the past against more hallucinatory daydreams; one moment, Cordero’s parents will be talking about familial tensions regarding an upcoming wedding, and the next, soccer balls will be raining from the sky. However, what binds both modes is that everything comes back to the unifying power of soccer and the Ecuadorian national team’s run. Diehards discuss player stats, fresh devotees try to memorize the roster, and every grade schooler in sight is dribbling a soccer ball, Julián included. The general excitement is palpable. Meanwhile, narration fills in the gaps, offering context about this time period and its political tensions, like how the country’s currency had recently crashed. It all serves to further capture how this sport gave people hope and a sense of community during an otherwise trying moment.

Although the main appeal of this experience is how it artfully conveys a particular atmosphere and energy, one of its most novel elements is its presentation. Its narrated facts, flights of fancy, and interactive recreations of the past make it work as a unique combination of documentary, fiction, and video game. To be clear, there are other games out there that can be more cleanly described as documentaries. Digital Eclipses’ interactive docs, specifically the ones in the Gold Master Series, have playable timelines that highlight legendary games and designers, with design documents, interviews, and more that capture the backstory behind each title in the compilation. They are quite neat.

Despelote differs in a few ways, though. First, unlike most documentary video games, it’s not about video games. Second, its approach is less akin to a traditional doc, with talking-head interviews and the like, and more like a “hybrid documentary,” which are fact-based but also include dramatized recreations. In this case, the narrator gives us the broad strokes, while the player experiences these facts firsthand in a sandbox-style replica of a specific Quito neighborhood. And of course, the biggest difference between this and traditional forms of documentary filmmaking is what sets games apart in general: the whole playing part.

Despelote places us in young Julián Cordero’s shoes by creating a truly convincing backdrop. Those previously mentioned details—the ambient chatter of gossiping neighbors, barking dogs, excited announcers commentating from a TV set—all come together to create a living and breathing space. There aren’t “setpieces” or much in the way of traditional scripted narrative moments, just the sights and sounds of life as you roam while dribbling a soccer ball. You’ll run from a school teacher angrily telling you off for skipping class or witness football heads engaging in their superstitious rituals. Together it works as something like the video game equivalent of direct cinema or cinéma vérité, capturing these lived experiences to make us participants in these events.

Of course, nothing here hasn’t been utilized by narrative games in the past. The use of sudden jump cuts calls to mind Thirty Flights of Loving’s influential presentation, and anyone who has explored Half Life 2’s dystopian backdrop and been given the order to “pick up that can” will likely recall this style of environmental storytelling. However, the way that Despelote puts these elements together feels notable because it chooses to bring the player into a real place populated by normal people (where you’re not playing as an assassin or infantryman), and it does so while capturing each lived detail. Hopefully, it has inspired at least a few other devs out there.

Even if Despelote is more of an autobiography than a documentary, its approach begs to be copied by other games interested in digging into the specifics of history. It’s easy to imagine entries in the “serious games” space recreating pieces of the past to educate or entertain in this same ambient style, where you play as more of a bystander to an unfolding moment rather than the hero scoring a game-winning goal. These historical events don’t even necessarily need to be the Battle of Waterloo or the crossing of the Rubicon; they could focus on the daily rigmarole of a specific time and place to convey a different cultural context, just like this game does.

If the purpose of grounded film styles like cinéma verité is to capture some sense of “truth,” that is, to tap into what others are going through or have gone through, Despelote achieves that same principle via a different approach. With its transportive delivery, it has us live out extraordinarily ordinary days illuminated by an unforgettable national event. All that’s left now is for more games to follow its lead.

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