To be clear, I don't blame anyone for doing this, I do it, and "Make a perception check" has become such a ubiquitous meme that everyone does it, but it's fucking awful and bad and I hate it. Just tell them what they see.

Investigation often gets used as the "active perception check", when it isn't. Investigation is you *drawing conclusions from available information*. Not just "perception but better" which is how a lot of DMs run it.

DMs: just tell them what they see. If there's enemies lurking, have them roll stealth against the players passive perception scores, that's why that number exists.
Players: if you want to know more, tell the GM you want to look around the room

I'm being dramatic of course but I hate this because it usually resolves the same way. One person in your party sees something the others don't, and then they say "I tell everyone what I just saw", rendering the entire exercise pointless.

Also someone please release a full game based around the Dispatching segments? It's so fun please I beg.

They stuck the landing though, it was a really nice little narrative well-told, enough that I want to play it again. It's success proves there is still a market for these sorts of games, I just pray that they expand on the ideas rather than limit choices further.

Idk, I'm enjoying it I just keep feeling like I've either got no choice, or the choices I do have don't matter, and in a choices matter experience like this I think that's an important thing to criticise.

Game is good, great even, I think I'm just used to being allowed to take bigger swings than this. Take the end of Episode 6 where Chase sacrifices himself to save Invisigal.
*Even if* that's a fixed point in the plot, let me try and stop him anyway, then idk he's too fast to stop.

I mean FFS, one of the post episode summaries said "You and 100% of players did x". I refuse to believe that nobody else did it a different way, the narrative choice there was either so badly signposted nobody picked it or there wasn't one. That's a problem, gang!

I'd like to take the time to write my thoughts out more explicitly but microblogging character limits are fucking me up, the point is: Choice, even illusion of choice, good for game like this and Dispatch isn't as good at it as prior attempts from this team.

That illusion is holding. Even if it turns out on a second play through where I pick Water Boy to fill the empty slot and Phenomaman turns up anyway, I still feel like I made some kind of narrative descion on where this whole thing goes.

I'm not saying every episode of Dispatch needs to end with a life or death choice, just choices that feel like I'm having a say.
To the game's credit, there are about 3 that I think work. Who you cut from Z Team, who you add to the Z Team, and whether you tell them you're Mecha Man.

What's important here is: it doesn't matter. By Episode 3, Lily kills the one you saved, and they're pretty much absent for Episode 2 but because they're around a bit, and you make more choices with them, they impact the narrative in subtle ways, and you *feel* like you made a choice with impact.

Compare and contrast to The Walking Dead, an apt comparison since AdHoc is made up of former Telltale Devs:
By the end of Episode 1, you need to choose who's life you save, Doug or Carley. The other one fucking dies and they're just... Gone from the story. All their plot threads are abandoned.

Like literally, you can just ignore all the dialogue about it and it never comes up again. In episode 2 you can cover for Invisigal and say you got an injury she inflicts on you by accident but it *never comes up again*. You don't get any dialog options about it either it's scuffed.

For example, Episode 1 basically has no choices that matter. At all. The big ones in the post episode summary are throwing a drink at Flambae and whether or not you kiss Blonde Blazer. The drink thing literally never comes up again, and you and Blazer can pretend the kiss never happened.

A lot of the choices I get to make feel like they don't matter in the slightest, which in a game where my *main source of interaction with the narrative is picking choices from a list* might be a problem.

Like not to be a whore but this stupid anime demon could shoot me in the stomach and I would fall to my knees and beg him to do it again

Beelzemon is my favourite, and so the fact I can ride his bike side saddle with a hand on his waist makes me both very happy and also makes me feel some kinda way 👀
The only way this could be better is if once you unlock Blast Mode, he carries you princess style