Your instinct might be to look up the meaning of ‘despelote’. It’s a fracas; a hot mess; a confused and chaotic situation. All of which could be used to describe elements of Despelote, if not the experience of playing it: within around two hours, Julián Cordero and Sebastián Valbuena deliver a snapshot of a specific place and time – Ecuador in 2001 – that is deliberately fuzzy but bold in detail and colour. Its firstperson frame contains multitudes: this is by turns an interactive childhood memory, a sports documentary with a side of social realism, a slice-of-life drama, and a disarmingly clear-eyed examination of the creative process. Its opening sequence shows how far football games have come since 2001; by the end, you may well be moved to consider the advancement of the medium as a whole.

In those early moments, though, you’re not thinking about any of that. You’re eight-year-old Julián, a lightly fictionalised version of Cordero, playing a knockoff Kick Off. The feel of Dino Dini’s top-down soccer sim is familiar, but the controls are not; you flick the right stick to kick the ball, or draw it back first for a more powerful, lofted strike. This, it turns out, is a cleverly disguised tutorial for when Julián has a ball at his feet in the real world – which amounts to a few blocks encompassing his house, school and Parque La Carolina in Quito, the Ecuadorian capital. The country has been overtaken by football fever, its catalyst shown here as former Southampton non-favourite (here a national hero) Agustín ‘Tin’ Delgado scores a late winner against Peru.