With the arrival of a number of successful and interesting episodic games, this approach to gaming seems to be growing more and more common.

This week the Moving Pixels podcast discusses the possibilities and limitations of a crime drama in episodic game form, The Detail.

This week, the Moving Pixels podcast crew discuss the high contrast world of White Night.

White Night tells the story of a haunted house and a decaying American economy.

Context matters, or so we are told.

So, this week we consider how thematic, aesthetic, and narrative contexts effect how we understand the mechanics of the games that we play.

Last October on our Halloween themed episode, we briefly alluded to a 20 minute indie horror point-and-click game by Owl Creek Games called Sepulchre.

We admired the game for its moody tone and understated horror, but it seemed too brief an experience to devote a whole podcast to. With the release of The Charnel House Trilogy, Owl Creek decided to build upwards and outwards from that central story into a new triptych of tales in which Sepulchre serves as the centerpiece.

So, this week we spend a little time chatting about what Sepulchre has blossomed into in this new expanded version of the original.

It's a style. It's interactive comedy. It's a game.

Maybe?

Even after playing it, it's hard to even begin to describe Jazzpunk.

But we'll do our best.

Action is most often the word that one expects to hear when talking about console games released by big publishers.

Square Enix's effort to release a game focused on investigation rather than on gunplay resulted in what is generally considered a failure, the ghost detective game Murdered: Soul Suspect. This week we consider what went right and went wrong in the resulting product.

For a video game designed within a game genre known for its often less spectacle-driven storytelling, The Cat Lady is surprisingly brutal, violent, and often appalling.

That being said, it is also a horror game that is more interested in the horrors of real life, depression and anxiety, than it is in its gorier and terrifying backdrop. This week we discuss the 2012 indie game and what it might have to say about the kind of horrors that real people grapple with everyday.

Valiant Hearts is not another first person shooter set in World War II. Instead, Valiant Hearts makes players puzzle through the oft forgotten significance of World War I to European history.

This week we discuss its choice of presenting the Great Conflict through cartoon aesthetics along with its puzzles and how these still manage to express the very serious events and consequences of World War I.

The Sims meets nihilism in this life simulator set within a war torn urban center.

This War of Mine is provocative, and this week we discuss the emergent narratives that arise from playing this indie from 11 bit Studios.

Shadow of Mordor features some beautifully designed mechanics, combat, and an innovative and interesting system, the Nemesis system, that approaches the development of your opponents in an innovative way.

It also tells a really stupid story.

Nevertheless, we can't stop playing it.