Happy Monday, folks, and welcome to the Weekly Video Games Thread!

It’s the end of August. My two weeks’ vacation is over, and in some ways, it feels like I’m in a totally different world than I was before it started. And so, as I was sifting through my file titled “future headers” for potential Weekly Video Games Threads, this shot from The Rise of the Golden Idol. The game is set decades, maybe half a century or more, after The Case of the Golden Idol, and although that doesn’t matter for gameplay or any of the plot points in the game itself, it definitely colors the sequel. Rise of the Golden Idol moves from the Victorian-esque upper crust scheming of its predecessor to a time closer to the 1970s. The technology is new, and it’s part of various puzzles. The themes become less about entrenched ideas of social status and more about wealth and corporate chicanery. Even the overarching conspiracy is something that simply wouldn’t make sense in the previous game’s era.

So, for today’s prompt, what’s your favorite timeskip in a game? For me, the most immediate answer is the second act of Fire Emblem: Three Houses, which is powerful and dramatic and exciting. But it’s far from the only one in a game. There’s the opening to Fallout 3, or Cyberpunk, or really any other RPG that uses time shifts to go from character creation to the full adventure. Plenty of visual novels and narrative adventures enjoy it; I found the ones in 1000xResist to be quite compelling, and the ones in Firewatch to be somewhat scary. And I’m sure I’m missing a few and will be kicking myself when someone comes in and references a game I absolutely love and am simply not thinking of at the moment. Obviously, this prompt is fairly large and can encompasses jumps between games, jumps within games, and jumps of all sorts of size and function.

And, as always, what did you play this weekend?