I’ve been binge watching The Tick for a future episode of the podcast (so much better than I remembered, and I remembered it pretty damn fondly) and I was struck by something that happens in episode four, The Tick versus Mr Mental where the Tick is forced to confront his greatest fear: WORKING IN AN OFFICE.

Dispatch is a 2025 superhero adventure game by AdHoc Studios released on Windows, Playstation 5, X-Box and Switch. And it, too, mines humour from the incongruity of a superhero working in a mundane office setting. But the way the game depicts this is very different from the way The Tick did thirty-two (JESUS CHRIST) years ago in ways that are both interesting and (to me, at least) kinda depressing.

So, AdHoc studios is a publisher of adventure games formed from the slightly singed survivors of the implosion of TellTale, which was itself formed by the survivors of Lucasarts’ adventure games division. It’s also not to be confused with DoubleFine, an adventure game company formed by former Lucasarts developers.

In case you haven’t picked up on this, it’s a genre with a lower survival rate than the Saw movies.

Anyway, TellTale games as a general rule were always more about the story than the gameplay, with the interactive elements always feeling somewhat vestigial. This wasn’t a problem (at least, not for fans of the studio) because by and large the writing, acting and production values of these games kicked ass. Dispatch is very much a TellTale-esque game in that you watch it far more than you play it, but it does make an honourable lunge towards the idea of actually being a computer game. But, first the plot (because with this kind of game, it really is the main focus).

In a world where superheroes are commonplace, Robert Roberts III is Mecha Man.

Bob pilots a giant robot which he inherited from his father who in turn inherited it from his father. But, when Bob battles and is defeated by a notorious super-villain named The Shroud (who killed his father), the suit is damaged and Bob is too broke to repair it and has to retire from superheroics.

Injured and powerless, Bob nevertheless tries to intervene in a robbery and is almost killed but is rescued by Blonde Blazer, a major league superhero who offers him a job.

Blazer works for SDN, the Superhero Dispatch Network, that basically acts as a call centre dispatching superheroes to wherever they’re needed in the city. She offers Bob a job overseeing SDN’s worst performing superhero team, a bunch of former supervillains trying to go straight(ish). over the course of several episodes Bob has to manage his team of loveable freaks, work on repairing his suit and avenging his father and trying to figure out who he wants to romance; Blonde Blazer or his troubled team-member Invisigal. Shouldn’t really be a tough choice, honestly. Blazer is beautiful, brilliant, successful and also just a really genuinely good person and Invisigal is a violent, borderline sociopathic fuckup. And yet.

If you want to know why you should play it, that’s simple enough. It’s a fantastic superhero story that expertly balances humour, action and heartfelt moments with a fantastic score and gorgeous visuals.

It’s also refreshingly dirty in its approach to both sex and violence which, in an era of overly sanitized corporate-approved slop I appreciate. It’s never mean or exploitative but it does feel like it trusts that you’re a grown up who’s not going to collapse in a fit of the vapours if you see a boob or an Irish dwarf punching someone in the dick.

The cast is also excellent. Aaron Paul is fantastic as Bob and makes what could have been a bland audience-insert protagonist feel like a real dude and pretty much all the cast, a mix of thespian heavyweights like Jeffrey Wright as well as various YouTube celebrities, acquit themselves very well.

As for the actual gameplay? It’s a’ight!

Much of the game is Bob looking out over a map of the city and dispatching different heroes to various crises and hoping that they’re the right choice. There’s also an RPG element where you can earn experience points and use them to level up your heroes.

It’s not the deepest gameplay, but it’s fun and satisfying and actually feels like a game which puts it ahead of pretty much everything TellTale ever made.

I have quibbles. Like the TellTale games it’s descended from, the game lies to you about just how much your choices actually make a difference. Most of the time the change will be cosmetic at best and the game will railroad you to prevent you going too far off the reservation. That’s less a gripe with this game though, and more a flaw of the genre as a whole.

That said, I would have liked if the story could align more neatly with the gameplay. To give a glaring example, at the end of one episode you are told that you will have to choose someone to fire from your team at the end of the shift. And, no matter how your game goes, it will always come down to choosing between the same two heroes, Coupé and Sonar.

And that is really galling if, like on my playthrough, they were carrying the entire goddamned team. I was practically screaming at the screen “Blazer, let me fire LITERALLY ANYONE ELSE BUT THOSE TWO. THEY ARE MY ROCKS. THEY ARE MY BABIES. FLAMBÉ LITERALLY TRIED TO SET ME ON FIRE IN THE BREAK ROOM LET ME CAN HIS ASS ALREADY.”

Anyway, these are just niggles. The game is awesome and I wholeheartedly recommend. But I had a rather uneasy realisation playing it. Superhero fiction has always been about wish-fulfillment and escape. Clark Kent casts off his shirt and tie to become Superman, flying through the air.

For the Tick, a superhero so in love with the life he doesn’t even have a civilian identity, working in an office is his greatest fear. And, in the same era that gave us Dilbert and Office Space that made perfect sense.

By contrast…

Bob Roberts suffers a terrible setback and gets offered a stable job. He gets to go to work, hang out with co-workers he likes, do a job that he’s good at and that gives him a sense of worth and purpose. Even the bland office decor feels less oppressive and more comfortably reassuring.

After 2008, Covid, decades of worsening economic inequality and an A.I. revolution devouring entry level jobs regardless of whether or not its ready to do them the game hits very differently.

In Dispatch, the escapist fantasy isn’t being a superhero.

It’s just having a stable well-paid job working for people that don’t treat you like utter shit.