DispatchIn 2012, Telltale Games released The Walking Dead and changed the medium forever by crafting one of the most beloved narrative experiences in the industry’s history. The title lit a fire for the episodic narrative experience, something Telltale would capitalize on with titles based on Game of Thrones, Batman, Borderlands, and more. And while other series like Life is Strange have carried the torch, Telltale’s closure in 2018 began a marked decline in the episodic narrative, raising questions about the genre’s continued viability. But one of 2025's biggest surprises, a superhero workplace comedy called Dispatch, has brought the genre back to the forefront.“Everyone told us not to do episodic, and we did it anyway. It’s clearly working,” Dispatch writer and AdHoc Studio co-founder Pierre Shorette tells Inverse. “If we came out three weeks ago, and were talked about and done within a week, that would have been the cycle we get.”AdHoc Studio was founded in 2018 by four former Telltale developers, including Shorette, who was one of the lead writers on The Wolf Among Us and Batman: The Telltale Series. Dispatch is the studio’s first game, made in collaboration with Critical Role, and features an all-star voice cast that includes the likes of Aaron Paul.Set in a superhero-filled world, you play as Robert Robertson, who’s powerless but inherited the incredible robotic suit of his father and grandfather that made them the legendary hero Mecha Man. After a battle goes wrong, the suit is damaged and Robert becomes a dispatcher at the Superhero Dispatch Network, working with rehabilitated villains and sending them out on missions. And while Dispatch has a unique setup, the development team was cognizant of the current state of superhero media.“I feel like superhero fatigue didn’t quite hit until the pandemic, when there was something in the formula that wasn’t quite working,” Shorette says. “When you go through the evolution of comics, it’s very much dudes in underwear flying around being good guys. Then there was an era where you start to get into the psychology, and then a meta layer of stuff like who’s cleaning up after these superhero fights. I think that’s maybe why we’re peeking past the fatigue.”Dispatch’s unique blend of workplace sitcom and superhero action gives it a distinct flavor. | AdHoc StudioOne of the more interesting aspects of Dispatch that reinforces the idea of office work is the dispatching minigame: strategic sections that have you sending out the right heroes to complete a variety of jobs, from saving cats from trees to preventing the assassination of a high-powered CEO. These sections started as a Watch Dogs-esque camera system, where you’d cycle through cameras to keep an eye on the city and your heroes. But the whole idea of working as a “dispatcher” changed the format, prompting the team to talk to designers on games like This Is the Police and XCOM.“My friend Sean Vanaman hired me at Telltale. He told me how he would name his XCOM characters after NFL quarterbacks. The second you do that, it’s like, ‘Oh no, Peyton Manning is down.’ It adds more personality to it,” Shorette says. “That was the impetus, thinking if we give people characters they care about, that they’re sending on missions, and there’s stakes and drama from the office that impacts how they’re working with you – that would add personality.”Dispatch’s strategic minigame changed significantly over development. | AdHoc StudioWith all that in mind, Shorette feels like Dispatch is a little “ahead of the curve” on pairing the mundanity of a superhero world with the fantastical, with the game largely telling its story via office cubicles, break rooms, and computer systems. Fascinatingly, Shorette says the idea for Dispatch initially started as a “live-action interactive thing,” but AdHod quickly found that would be too expensive. So the studio switched to animation, while the idea of an office-based experience carried over. Some aspects of the game simply wouldn’t have been possible in live-action, like Episode 5’s standout bar fight. But considering the initial intention, Shorette and the team took liberal inspiration from a variety of TV shows as the game went through its iterations.“Because we worked on it so long, there was a phase where we were into Ted Lasso,” Shorette says. “There’s The Bear DNA in there, like a guy who has higher standards walking into a situation where everyone has to step up. Veep is another, with the biting shit talk. If you think of that, like the Venn Diagram of Veep, The Bear, and Ted Lasso, we’re trying to be somewhere inside.”Shorette says Dispatch doesn’t contain the exploration segments of Telltale games because they wouldn’t serve a purpose here, and the studio didn’t want the feature “for the sake of it.” | AdHod StudioSimilar to those shows, players have clearly taken to the eclectic cast of Dispatch, from the fiercely rebellious but charming Invisigal to the bizarre bat-headed tech bro Sonar. Of course, Robert himself is the glue that holds the whole thing together, and he’s gone through as much change as the game itself.“We definitely changed [Robert] when Aaron Paul came on. I don’t know that I actually write anything to anyone when I’m working on things, I sort of view characters more like archetypes,” Shorette says. “And it's been interesting these last couple weeks, watching people play. I’ve realized, not the cool parts of Robert, but the shitty parts are definitely in me somewhere. I feel like I felt like hot shit coming out of Telltale. For a long time, there was this feeling of ‘I’m really confident about what I do, but no one believes I’m gonna be good at it.’ Which I think Robert has.”And like so many pieces of media, Robert’s personality and role were also shaped by the major events of recent years.“Inherently, he’s just a guy trying to make the best of a bad situation or dealing with some personal turmoil, even if he exudes confidence. He isn’t sure if he’s on the right path or how he got here, and that’s a feeling I definitely had during the pandemic and post-pandemic era,” Shorette says. “We’re all figuring out life in a different way. It switched, I think there’s a pre-pandemic and post-pandemic in all our brains, right? So maybe it’s tapping into that. I think there’s probably a more cynical draft of this that we were working on at some point.”Robert is Aaron Paul’s first role video game role, with the actor recently saying that he’s always wanted to act in the medium. | AdHoc StudioAlthough Robert might be the driving force of Dispatch, like those classic Telltale games, it’s very much a choice-based experience, giving players agonizing choices that can shape and mold the story. And with Dispatch bringing back so many elements of those Telltale experiences, I was particularly interested in getting Shorette’s view on choice in narrative-driven games.“I think I have a unique view on this, like, I don’t think that people should tell others how to enjoy things, right? If people ask me how I enjoy things, I’d say ‘What’s the value? Is it meaningful? What are they after?’” Shorette says. “I think that maybe they want to feel like they haven’t been tricked or manipulated, but I don’t think that’s right. Another word for illusion is magic. And it’s the magic of choice, because anytime you press a button, you’re more invested in that story. And if a choice comes up and you pause the screen because you don’t know what to do, you’re invested in both paths. I think that’s magical.”Shorette notes that he thinks that sort of experience is integrally different from what you get in a TV show or a movie, and that the “illusion of choice” is almost a misnomer.“The people who freak out over whether choices matter. Well, do you go to a magic show and sit back and go, ‘bullshit, it’s not real.’ Or was it enough that we all showed up and experienced this thing? We did multiple endings in Season 2 of The Walking Dead. What we found is that people sometimes got the ending they might have wanted intellectually, but not the one that hits them emotionally. They’d go ‘Let me check out what happens if I stayed with Kenny’ and when you watch it, they’re bawling. I think you want a satisfying experience with some entertainment. Maybe you learn something and see Robert stick up for himself in a way that you wouldn’t do yourself, and you get a practice run. I think choices should matter; take the lessons of video games and make choices matter in your life. This is about having an experience that feels full, that you’re invested in.”Shorette says there’s likely to be more speculation about a Season 2 after players finish the game’s finale. | AdHoc StudioAnd Dispatch’s success would certainly seem to imply that what AdHoc has done has worked, with the game already selling over a million copies. But the big question now is what the overwhelming reception for the game means for the future of not just Dispatch, but the studio.“I think it’s a little too early to know what our future holds, because we’re having a hard time accepting our current reality at the moment – this is a far larger success than any of us anticipated. We’re delighted about it, but in terms of [AdHoc's] identity, we’re four people who worked at Telltale. We’re all narrative-driven folks, it’s our bread and butter,” Shorette says. “We’re definitely going to sit in this interactive narrative space, there’s nothing like it. And I think that there’s a bit of an inferiority complex video games have with Hollywood and TV sometimes. I don’t have to caveat why something is brilliant with someone. Like I’ll put Red Dead Redemption up to anyone in terms of Western epics.”AdHoc has a game planned within the Critical Role universe, continuing that partnership. The other major question mark is The Wolf Among Us 2, which Shorette and others at AdHoc wrote a script for Telltale to develop (the Telltale brand was revived in 2019) before the project fell into limbo.“Just to clarify, we aren’t working on it [The Wolf Among Us 2] at this time. We worked on it for a couple of years. Last I checked, [Telltale is] still plugging away, but I basically know as much as everyone else,” Shorette says. “Do I hope they make the script we wrote? Yeah. But it’s not our project, so we’re waiting in anticipation as much as everyone else.”All eight of Dispatch’s episodes are now available. | AdHoc StudioOn a larger scale, it feels like Dispatch is a proof of concept for how narrative episodic games can still work, and that there’s a real hunger among audiences for these experiences. That’s a market gap that no one has been able to capitalize on for almost a decade, until now.“As someone who used to just be a guy who made video games or worked on story and just stayed in my lane, and now have to do business development things, go to events, talk to suits... they get the money to decide what anything is. Unfortunately, we’re a game industry that is run by trends and part of the gap in the market is because I don’t think people at these places realize they create the industry we’re in,” Shorette says. “If they decide that ‘Oh, narrative games don’t work,’ then they don’t work until one proves they’re wrong. Oftentimes, people don’t want to take a risk on anything; they want to say, ‘This other game made a billion dollars, so let's make that game.’”Despite all that, Shorette is heartened by the reception of Dispatch, and by how people have played it.“We’re not reinventing the wheel, just tapping into something we’ve all been missing,” Shorette says. “There’s a whole new generation, I’m all over TikTok and watching people experience Dispatch for the first time — many who maybe never played any of those [Telltale] games. For them to be able to experience that for the first time, I’m glad we’ve gotten to be a kind of banner for that experience.”Dispatch is available on PC and PS5.