Tag: Episode

Pilot Season – Last Week to Vote

A few weeks ago I once again recorded episodes for Let’s Play series for my YouTube channel, setting up pilots for you all to vote on. Hollow Knight, Ori & the Blind Forest, Dead Cells and Shiness: The Lightning Kingdom. These are the games I’d like to run a Let’s Play for, but I will only go on with the one you choose.

The polls have been open for a while now and they will remain so until this Sunday, when I’ll pick the winner and push on with the second episode of a new series. As of writing, Hollow Knight is at the front with 60% of all votes, with Ori & the Blind Forest and Shiness: The Lightning Kingdom following behind with 20% each. It doesn’t seem like people enjoyed Dead Cells very much.

If you haven’t voted, here’s a recap of every pilot, along with the episode so you can check it out and make up your mind. Above all, I hope you enjoy them! You can find the poll at the bottom and on The Mental Attic’s front page!

Continue reading Pilot Season – Last Week to Vote

Preview: Bear With Me – Episode 1

Bear with Me is a new point & click adventure game. Yes, it’s episodic, because they’re all episodic now. Strangely, when I got the press release offering the review code it didn’t mention anything about it being just the first episode of the season, so imagine my surprise when, preparing myself for a long playthrough I find myself facing the dreaded sentence “End of Episode One.”

With that bit of discomfort out of the way, I have to say I enjoyed the first episode greatly. The game is full of wonderful atmosphere, a genius combination between childhood innocence and youthful imagination and the grim bitter reality of the Noir genre. When you have a convincing private detective in a teddy bear, you know you’re in for a nice adventuring romp. Continue reading Preview: Bear With Me – Episode 1

Episodic Nightmare – The worrying trends of Episodic Gaming

Over the past couple of years, along with the rise of crowdfunding I’ve seen another trend emerge in gaming, one that will slowly reach the same level of shenanigans: Episoding Gaming. Episodic Games come in seasons, their story split into multiple chapters with their own price tag and of course the usual season pass, and over the course of potentially many years.

It used to be that episodic games were the domain of independent developers, those struggling to make enough money to meet development costs. The episodic nature would let them earn money on small bits of the game while they work on others. It also helps them by splitting the development into defined chunks, something useful I believe when they’re juggling day jobs with the game development responsibilities.

But while that is still somewhat true, there is a growing trend of full-time and highly successful game studios releasing games in the episodic format as well. Some have done it for ages and see no need to change now, as the business models suits them best, knowing how to take advantage of new episode releases to boost sales. Others use “episodic” as an excuse to cover up a delayed development and some just want to milk the trend as much as they can. Then there are the episodic titles released by major publishers, those that have no need for this type of content save for feeding the marketing fires. This last one has another side effect that I hope doesn’t become a common occurrence: releasing full games as episodic, splitting it up haphazardly in “post-production.” Continue reading Episodic Nightmare – The worrying trends of Episodic Gaming