"Minecraft: Story Mode" by Telltale Games

I never expected I'd get to play this.

Let me explain. The original Minecraft has had four spinoffs over the course of its long life: Minecraft Dungeons, a sort-of-roguelike; Minecraft Legends, a real-time strategy; Minecraft Earth, an augmented reality phone game discontinued in 2021 because of the plaaaaague; and Minecraft: Story Mode, which is this one and which was discontinued in 2019 following the demise of the company that made it.

Fortunately, I was recently at a place with some PS4s you could play on, and one of the discs they had was for none other than Minecraft: Story Mode.

Its gameplay is kind of hard to describe; I think my best bet would be to say it's basically an interactive TV show. You make various dialogue choices and just choices in general, which shape the narrative going forward, and it's organized into "episodes".

I must make a disclaimer before I continue: I didn't finish this. I did manage to get through the first four episodes, but then I ran out of time. As such, this is mostly a review of those four: "The Order of the Stone," "Assembly Required," "The Last Place You Look," and "A Block and a Hard Place".

They constitute what's basically a story arc, dealing with a giant world-destroying monster called the Wither Storm that's destroying the world. It looks appropriately scary. 

(The other four episodes of Season 1 are just random self-contained adventures, for the most part.)

I described this game to one of my relatives as "basically if Winter Morgan was good." It hits many of the same plot beats as Winter Morgan's myriad series of rather shovelwarey unofficial Minecraft novels: somewhat unrealistic use of command blocks, bands of unlikely everyman heroes, et cetera. Unlike those books, however, this one is official, and its heroes are much more competent. Its villains are also actually competent and threatening, contrary to Winter Morgan's grandiose and pretentious bad guys.

I don't really have any desire to play Minecraft Earth. Unlike the other spinoff games, it was designed to be a mobile game, and those are mostly somewhat interchangeable.

I think Minecraft: Story Mode is the only official Minecraft product to acknowledge the existence of command blocks in-story. Make of that what you will.

This is a videogame, and it's rated E10+.

4 stars.

(Endnote: i have failed to keep to my schedule. oh the horror)