Minecraft: Story Mode

I remember thinking, while playing Lego The Lord of the Rings a couple of years ago, that it's amazing how unenjoyable the Lego games can get when you couldn't give a toss about the subject material. Turns out Telltale's games suffer roughly the same fate.

There is a slight difference, though, because this is more about characters than source material. I will (hopefully) articulate my feelings about Minecraft more eloquently elsewhere, but essentially it boils down to me not having time to get the best out of this kind of game any more these days. I absolutely love the idea of Minecraft, but my age and living/working circumstances mean that it's fundamentally not for me. That's no reflection on the game itself, of course, but perhaps it is a reflection on Telltale's decision to use this as their source material - the exact reasons it's not for me (the extent to which it demands that the player invests huge quantities of time and mental energy in order to get the best out of it) are the same reasons why it's such a weird thing to try to bash into this format.

In order for Telltale to make anything of this, they've had to essentially invent a lot of Minecraft lore and create their own characters. When it comes to the first of those two things, it's understandable that they may have struggled - everything they've adapted so far has either given them exactly the right amount of canonical to construct a world and story from (Jurassic Park, Back to the Future, The Walking Dead) or such a huge amount that they've been able to trim it down to their favourite parts (Game of Thrones, Batman, the fairy tales that inform Fables), so having to essentially conjure and explain an entire story, rather than being able to rely on information the player already knows about these worlds, is new to them. The second point, though, is where this game is incredibly disappointing. Telltale have had to write their own characters before, and have managed to put together some of my favourite characters in gaming history while doing so - Mira Forrester, Lee Everett, and Clementine to name the obvious ones, but I could have added a lot more from Game of Thrones there - but they drop the ball so badly here. Not one of these characters really lands, and almost all of them feel like little more than stock stereotypes, round pegs dropped into round holes with the absolute minimum of fuss or inspiration.