Episodic game releases are tricky business. From a developer’s standpoint, it makes a lot of sense, and can even be a necessity. Perhaps you run out of resources and need to release a “part 1" of your dream game in order to drum up the funds to finish the rest. Or maybe that “part 1" gets so soundly rejected you scrap making the game altogether, and only wasted a little bit of time and money on making that initial slice compared to making an entire game upfront. And often when a game is released episodically the development of the remaining episodes is actually steered based on the feedback from players of the early episodes, which I think is really cool. But as a consumer, episodic releases can be really scary. I mean nobody wants to pay for a game that never gets finished, right" And we’ve all had games that we’ve loved that never receive their promised updates or new content, especially on mobile. There’s a certain risk in buying into an episodic game before all its episodes are released.
That was most certainly the feeling when developer Robot Circus launched Ticket to Earth ($3.99) back in March of 2017. The game was a fantastic mashup of matching mechanics and strategy RPG, and its gameplay, presentation, and story all had players howling at the moon with enjoyment. The only problem was that it released as just the first episode in a planned four part story, and that first episode was both rather short and ...