AdHoc Studio is a game company founded by industry veterans coming together from Telltale Games, Ubisoft, and more, with a focus on narrative adventure games. Their first game, Dispatch, kicks off this week.
In Dispatch, you take on the role of Robert Robertson, a former superhero who has been relegated to managing a team of rehabilitated super villains aiming to make amends for their pasts and turn over a new leaf. At least, that’s how it’s pitched to you at first when you’re recruited by Blonde Blazer. Naturally, forcing a bunch of alpha-type personalities to work together as a team will have plenty of ups and downs.
Since Dispatch is a narrative-driven adventure game, that means a large majority of gameplay is essentially watching cutscenes, choosing dialogue options, and making choices that impact the flow of the story and what happens to certain characters.
Even the Steam page describes Dispatch, first and foremost, as a “superhero workplace comedy” before it mentions anything about its game mechanics. It’s certainly a unique approach that aims to deliver a very tightly crafted, fast-paced, and well-rounded story like you’d get in a weekly TV series.
Evolving the narrative adventure game genre
There’s a free demo out on Steam for anyone to try, and the end result is clearly something that blurs the line between TV and games with its all-star cast of voice talent. Actors in the game include the likes of Laura Bailey, Jeffrey Wright, Erin Yvette, Matthew Mercer, and many others, not to mention Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul voicing the main player character in his debut video game performance.
Last week, AdHoc Studio hosted a virtual press tour in which I was given the opportunity to interview select members of the voice cast for the game. You can watch all of the interviews combined in the video embedded above, but I’ve also picked out select quotes for the rest of the article below.
What sets Dispatch apart, even from its fellow narrative adventure contemporaries, is that it doesn’t actually include any gameplay segments of you walking around the game world at all. The entire game is, essentially, a collection of cutscenes in which you get to choose dialogue and make choices that affect the outcome, broken up by some light strategy and puzzle-solving mechanics.
From a development perspective, the planning process for a game like Dispatch can often resemble something more like an animated film for much of the cast. There are detailed storyboards and very in-depth materials to help frame scenes and expectations.
“The guys at AdHoc are great, they know exactly what they want in a scene, they have a ton of pre-vis materials, or a storyboard, that lets you know exactly where the character is, so you have a very solid mental picture in your mind of the character and how they’re behaving,” Travis Willingham, the voice of Phenomeman, said in the interview.
Willingham adds, “I think what’s so great about Dispatch is that it’s such a unique take on the superhero genre. I love fall from grace stories. Seeing Robert Robertson fall and then having Blonde Blazer come in and offer this chance at finding a new way to make an impact on the world. An organization that rehabilitates super villains as heroes and then dispatches them for errands around the city is such a cool idea.”
The unique premise is a testament to the creative minds at AdHoc being able to riff on established concepts and ideas in fresh ways.
“Working with creators and directors who have a specific vision, know how to execute it, and yet are open to collaboration, and then working with excellent writing, makes our job so much easier,” Erin Yvette, the voice of Blonde Blazer, said in the interview.
Rising popularity of narrative-focused games
Many people complain of superhero fatigue, or being tired of superhero content in pop culture these days, but Dispatch sidesteps that conversation with its original ideas.
“I felt very lucky to be recording the dialogue that we were,” Laura Bailey, the voice of Invisigal, said in the interview. “Pierre [Shorette] and Nick [Herman] are an incredible duo, and having worked with them on previous projects at Telltale, I’m always blown away by the characters they create and the way that they write. They do comedy banter better than almost anybody else that I’ve worked with. And the depth of the characters that they create, it’s just a real joy to get to be a part of it.”
Many developers at AdHoc Studio, including members of the founding team, worked at Telltale Games before its original shutdown. Telltale Games is a celebrated game studio that specializes in episodic narrative-driven games with a heavy focus on player choice, creating branching paths in the story so that players have a real feeling of agency. The new version of Telltale Games seems to be carrying on that legacy, but it’s new talent and new management now.
“I feel like it’s such a tumultuous time in the industry in general; it’s hard to know where anything is going to go,” Bailey said. “Studios get shut down out of the blue.”
The last few years have been incredibly volatile across the game industry. Notably, it’s beginning to appear like the trend to heavily invest in the adoption of live service models for games is contracting. According to the voice talent for Dispatch, gamers are hungrier now for hand-crafted narrative experiences than ever before.
“As a player myself, I absolutely would love more narrative games; it’s always been one of my favorite genres,” Yvette said. “The episodic nature of this is really appealing to me because I want a reason to have to stop playing because I’m going to want to keep playing, and I can’t. I know I’m not alone as folks who continue to love games as we take on more and more life responsibilities, but we no longer have the same amount of time to dedicate to [games], so to get such a fulfilling experience in such a short amount of time is quite a feat and it’s something I would love to see more of.”
Although narrative-driven games like Dispatch don’t necessarily need to be shorter in all cases, they usually end up being much shorter than open-world never-ending games designed to dominate your free time. On the flip side, Dispatch has a story to tell, wants you to be actively involved with it every step of the way, and then it ends.
“It gets rid of the fat that a lot of video games have, especially for someone like me,” Joel Haver, the voice of Waterboy, said in the interview. “I feel guiltier and guiltier about playing video games the older I get, so it’s nice to have a package where there’s no fat on this, I’m just getting a story told to me, I’m making decisions, the gameplay is satisfying when it does come up.”
Critically, single-player games dominate attention. Games like Astro Bot, Baldur’s Gate 3, The Last of Us Part II, God of War, and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild are all non-live service games that are fully playable single-player. Other winners that include limited cooperative elements, such as Elden Ring and It Takes Two, are also very refined and focused experiences, devoid of much bloat or excess.
“We saw a decade-long trend of bigger, bigger, bigger, more stuff in games, and I think the common sentiment now is that we went too far,” Haver said. “Now, we need games that are condensed packages that you can sit and play in 8-10 hours and have somebody craft you an experience rather than telling you to make it yourself.”
Dispatch from AdHoc Studio releases for PC and PlayStation 5 Episodes 1 and 2 on October 22, 2025, with two episodes slated to release each following week until it concludes on November 12 with the releases of Episode 7 and 8.