Minecraft: Story Mode

This one, I didn’t really understand. I bought it for the children and fancied playing something mindless one day so put it in, mainly to see what the fuss was about. Everyone seemed to be raving about this latest instalment of the Tell Tale Games’ point and click adventure series but I didn’t see how Minecraft could be turned into an engaging story.

Obviously it’s my opinion but I was not a massive fan of the storyline. You play as Jessie, a sexually ambiguous boy/girl who has some friends who want to win some kind of building contest. From here, the world gets threatened by destruction from the wither storm, a nasty thing with lots of heads that kills everyone.

The storyline gets gradually more depressing as you play and by the end I was struggling to pick up the controller to carry on. This is partly down to Tell Tale’s moral choice game play where it’s a case of, ‘in which way would you like to fail?’ This is what grinds my gears about all of these Tell Tale games. The choices you make never lead you to a good ending where everyone survives. It’s basically a case of choose who will die.

The main game (excluding DLC) is 5 episodes long and Tell Tale did their usual thing of releasing them periodically. I, however, chose to play it after all the episodes were released which meant I could do it back to back. In hindsight, this is probably why I found it so depressing.

Achievements – 1,375 Points – 50 Achievements

Now the initial release just includes Episode One but the main game is effectively the first five episodes so that’s how I’m choosing to view it. Looking at the achievements, there are some choices that were made which were quite confusing.

In Episode one, you have to make a lever when you are supposed to make a sword and complete all the chapters. Episode two actually had an alternate path achievement for acquiring two different characters so you have to play that one twice. Episode three has an achievement for talking to your pet pig over and over again until there are no more dialogue options. After that, there are no more different things to do and the achievement list reverts back to completing the episode and nothing more.

I know I’ve said this before but I don’t understand this approach. You have an achievement system; you sort of started using it... and then thought ‘na, fuck this’ and just continued to list completing the chapters as achievements. I don’t get it.

Downloadable Content

Tell Tale released a further three episodes for this shit which is more than they’ve done for any of their other franchises. You basically get stuck in a never ending circle of doors that lead to different worlds. Jessie only seemed to have ‘be a cock’ dialogue options which means you no choice but to come across as totally knob-jockey for three hours.

The achievements are more of the same –just complete the episodes if you can stay awake long enough to do so.

MInecraft Story Mode did nothing for me in terms of narrative engagement or exciting game play. I also found that it didn’t hold my attention which meant that I missed a lot of dialogue options. Not that it mattered as being missing all dialogue choices for the whole game wouldn’t have made me miss any of the achievements.