Back in the day, Minecraft got popular, and it has had incredible staying power. It's literally the best selling videogame ever released. I remember firing it up back then. After a few minutes, I wondered what the point was. I just didn't get it. I've seen lots of creations that people have built. While I appreciate them, Minecraft is simply not something that I'm interested in. Minecraft: Story Mode is a Telltale game series, and is quite different.

You play as a teenager named Jesse. The series starts off with you and your friends discussing what you should build for a competition, and which one would beat your arch-rivals. Winning launches you into a fancy party where things go south: someone summons a monster that starts eating the world. The first 5 episodes deal with this threat. You go around meeting and convicing members of The Order of the Stone to join you. You learn their secrets to ultimately defeat the threat and save the world.

Once you've saved the world, what else is there? The next few issues center around Jesse and friends adventuring around other worlds in a hallway of portals. It's never end of the world stakes, but are plenty entertaining in their own right.

Actual gameplay involves dialog option selection during long dialog sequences, investigating random rooms, crafting items, and pressing keys during quick time events. The actual choices are your standard Telltale fare that mostly don't matter.

Unlike the comic book artstyle typical of other Telltale series, these visuals are stereotypical Minecraft. I recall a lot of clipping in the graphics of previous series that makes them feel clunky and unpolished. I never saw any of that here. And unlike most other series, this one has clear sound (no MP3 compression artifacts).

This game is no longer available to buy on Steam. At least it appears as a single item in my library (instead of each episode being separate items).