Game review: Minecraft: Story Mode (Episode 1) is fun to play

Minecraft: Story Mode (Episode 1) features comedy and a great story.

There are plenty of in-jokes in Minecraft: Story Mode (Episode 1). Courtesy Telltale Games

Minecraft: Story Mode (Episode 1)

Xbox One

Dh18

Four stars

Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, writers and directors of The Lego Movie, brought anarchism, comedy and sheer eccentric brilliance to the animation of plastic bricks. Minecraft, thanks to Microsoft's cash pile, is now a billion-dollar property and a clear candidate for the same kind of treatment: a digital world where imagination is the only limit and children are free to build whatever they can dream of. Sound familiar?

So Microsoft brought in Telltale Games, manufacturers of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style narrative games, who previously adapted for console the critically acclaimed but harrowing zombie drama The Walking Dead, and Game of Thrones– both exquisitely rendered visions of man's inhumanity to man. Telltale Games have rightly won plaudits for writing and storytelling, and have followed in the thematic footsteps of Fahrenheit, Heavy Rain, and, to a lesser extent, Bioware. Their dramatic chops are strong, but can they make a family-friendly game?

In episode one of Minecraft: Story Mode, your gender-­customisable hero, Jesse, finds him – or herself – at a building convention with friends (and a pig called Reuben), when a bad guy unleashes a giant monster. Jesse must seek the help of the lost members of the Order of the Stone, a team of legendary Minecraft warriors, and sets out on a journey to find them.

The challenge is in telling a story with the right tone. Telltale's previous efforts have usually revolved around morally compromising the player by forcing them to make horrific choices. The Lego Movie shows how it should be done: an incredibly upbeat, energetic and humorous story that has enough genuine weirdness and out-of-the-box creativity that adults and kids both love it. Minecraft: Story Mode definitely aims to be cute and funny in a similar vein. The voice acting is strong and earned more than a few chuckles over the course of the episode – Axel, voiced with aplomb by Brian Posehn, was particularly amusing. There are plenty of in-jokes that devotees of Minecraft videos will get, particularly the machine that infinitely circulates chickens makes a cameo. There's also plenty of self-aware nudges at the silliness of Minecraft crafting mechanics and the simplicity of the animation.

It's debatable whether the balance between the adult audience and the kid audience has been struck exactly right, though – some jokes will fall flat to adults. Gameplay is familiar to anyone who has played a Telltale Game: mostly choices made in dialogue. There is a crafting mechanic, in which assorted objects are combined to produce unrelated objects – such is the logic of Minecraft. There is a combat mechanic, in which you press right-trigger to swipe your sword, but this is peripheral at best.

Oddly, the actual building part of the game – the bit that is most central to Minecraft proper – is breezed through with quick-time events: "Press X to build giant stone zombie." It would be nice if Minecraft: Story Mode allowed you to do a bit more building. Episode one is fun to play. If the comedy hits its stride, and the story holds up, the rest should be too.