Like most people I fell in love with Telltale Games via the Walking Dead series, and the surprisingly excellent The Wolf Among Us. Before they mastered the art of giving you bad choices and making you feel awful for the one you picked, the tone of their games was more comedic and childish in nature. I was never interested in these titles, and as you might expect Minecraft Story Mode closer to the Monkey Island and Sam & Max games than the studio’s other recent work. Aside from that, though, there is a feeling that Minecraft is a mercenary title. It feels like the kind of work an artist might craft for a wealthy patron so they have enough money to work on what they really want. It is not bad, but it feels like some of the passion is missing.
Minecraft Story Mode tells the story of Jessie, a builder in the world of Minecraft who is entering a building competition so his work may be featured in the upcoming builder’s convention, Endercon. Through a series of unlikely events, he and his friends becomes embroiled in a conflict among the Brotherhood of the Stone, a group of legendary adventures, and a frightful creature known as the Wither. The story is your average fantasy fare with a Minecraft skin, though you can’t really blame Telltale for that as the source material does not have a narrative. It was disappointingly predictable for people who have played past games by this developer. You could easily guess who was going to dislike who, when the group was going to have a disagreement, and most other story points. That combined with the many choices that as a Telltale veteran you know won’t really matter, and it feels like you get to see the machinery behind the great amusement park ride you are on. The illusion is damaged.
There is some weight to decisions you make in Episode 1 that manifest in Episode 2. The choice is very evident, and it comes at the end of the first chapter. This choice will greatly alter the first half of the second chapter. It makes no difference in the great scheme of the story mind you. You will still end up in the same place with the same characters, but it is still an entirely different segment of gameplay, and it does add some unprecedented replay value to the game for those who want to play the game over and over.
While Minecraft Story mode is most certainly a Telltale game, with no open world, or crafting, or gathering, it does try its best to include some of Minecraft’s mechanics into the experience. There are some sections where crafting is necessary, and you are given a choice of what to craft, but everything serves the same purpose of moving the story forward and the options are fairly limited, usually by whatever items the group has on them at that moment and a handful of recipes.
I recognize that I am not the target audience for this game. I am not a Minecraft fan and I am not interested in games that won’t let me traumatize children. However, I happen to live with two children who are huge Minecraft fans, and who play the game with devotion, along with all of their friends in school. For the sake of fairness, I decided to play the game with them. It is important to see how they would react to a game that aside from art direction, really has little in common with the source material.It is safe to say that both Telltale and Mojang understand what makes the target audience of this series tick, because both of my children were enthralled by story mode. They played both episodes several times, and they loved it every time. Maybe I’d like it more if all of my friends at recess had it and were talking about it.
When it comes to this type of product, I would usually recommend that fans of the developer pick it up. In this case I’d recommend holding on to see what the three remaining chapters have to offer. It is not bad, but unlike the other Telltale properties it did not transcend its source material and made me care about properties I would not usually not think twice about. However, if you have a child that is a Minecraft fan (or are a fan yourself), you may as well just buy the season pass because they will love it, learn it, and play it to the point where it is suicide inducing (for you, not for them). I guess this means it is a successful game, but not successful enough to thaw my frozen heart.
