Don't Nod on Lost Records: Bloom and Rage's episodic structure: "We enjoyed telling stories in an episodic way"

For a while, we became accustomed to seeing narrative-heavy adventure games, from developers like Don't Nod and Telltale, debuting and using and episodic structure where a new chunk of the story would be released on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. But, this has become less common these days, with a more complete, full launch being favoured instead in a lot of cases once again. We'll see this in effect next month when Deck Nine debuts Life is Strange: Double Exposure in full at the end of the month, but we'll see a kind of return to an episodic structure in 2025 when Don't Nod launches Lost Records: Bloom and Rage.

Speaking about this decision to use an episodic setup that sees the first half of the game arriving on February 18 and the second on March 18, I spoke with Don't Nod, where senior executive producer Luc Baghadoust told me:

"I think we enjoyed telling stories in an episodic way. You know, we've done that on Life is Strange 1, Life is Strange 2. Here, at first, we were not sure about the episodic... if it would be episodic or not, but [creative director Michel Koch], when he's creating the game, he thinks episodically. I think you're a fan of TV shows and it made sense at some point for the game to be episodic. We know the audience like that. We didn't want too much time between episodes. That's why one month, I think, is enough for people to engage, to talk about the game, what's going to happen in the second one, and then, you're able to tell a story in a way that creates excitement, possibly around the end of the first episode. We hope people are still excited about episodic games."

We'll have to see whether this episodic setup sticks the landing in early 2025 when Lost Records: Bloom and Rage arrives on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.