Happy Monday, folks! Welcome to the Weekly Video Games Thread.

This week, I intend to play through The Walking Dead Episode 3. Telltale’s horror adventure game has been one of the highlights of this weekly Game Pass series of mine, and I’m excited to see what cruelties await Lee, Clementine, and the rest of the group. There’s a lot of great stuff in these episodes, but I think one of the most interesting is just that: that they’re episodes, released independently over the course of months. While this isn’t my first episodic game (Kentucky Route Zero and Resident Evil: Revelations 2) or the first I’ve played before its official completion (Deltarune, though technically I did start after its second and most recently finished episode came out), this one has gotten me thinking about them.

‘Cause it’s such a strange format, right? I mean, it’s been around in some form forever. The way DOOM was originally released, chunks of levels at a time, is a very similar model. Live service games operate on a similar way, just with more long form seasons. But this system of big, defined chunks at least carries a special energy. Games already can feel very different very different based on how they’re structured, whether they use explicit chapters or a “world / level” dealio or a giant big smorgasbord of content. These just add this really big definition to the structure, especially if they – like The Walking Dead – have actual “sneak peaks” or trailers for their later episodes.

Anyway, I’ve got a lot of feelings on these, and I imagine I’ll be discussing them more over the coming weeks as I play more of them and see how the episodes work together. But here’s where you come in. Episodic games: how do you feel about them? Do you have favorite entries? Favorite forms of the model? Do you have a history with them? And unrelated to all that, but what did you play this weekend?