Review: Minecraft: Story Mode - Episode 5: Order Up

Minecraft Story Guide: Story Mode - Episode 4: A Block and a Hard Place is the strongest episode yet in basically every aspect. Employing emotional factors as well as hard story elements, Telltale has managed to create a story that originated from just a few blocks. Every second of this two hour episode was spent towards making the player feel as though everyone really is depending on them to save the world. Hard times fall, but Jessie and his friends make this episode an unforgettable experience that one can only hope to be transferred to next and final episode of this series.

We’re all familiar with the standard demo format: you play a section of a game (almost always the tutorial up until just before the first boss), and then everything comes to an abrupt halt while a screen either asks you to unlock the full game to continue, or tells you when it’s coming out. If you’re very lucky (as in the case of most Devil May Cry demos) you’ll get to play through a level and fight a boss out of context. This might convince you to get the full game, or tide you over until a game you’ve been waiting for has been released, but either way, it’s almost always stuff you’ll have to redo once the game proper begins.

Ellegard (for me) and Gabriel begin conversing in hopes that he would regain his memory and in doing so, mentions something about Lukas' jacket, saying that he has seen others wearing it inside of the Witherstorm. With this comes Jessie's first big decision, either allowing Lukas to leave in hopes of finding his friends or make him stay to help in your fight. This is only the first of many heartrending decisions that need to be made throughout the entirety of this episode. While most of these decisions are among the toughest in any of the episodes, they help dictate how the game will end and who will be standing next to Jessie when it does. This episode lets you customize your decisions a little bit more, allowing you to decide which weapon you want to create for the final battle, which armor you would like to wear, and even in what manner you will enter the Witherstorm. It isn't much, but that's far more customization than most Telltale games allow. While it is important to be careful with your decisions, it's more important to learn who your real allies are and dictate how you want your destiny to unfold in your fight towards saving this blocky humanity.

Ideally it's the optimal situation for consumers. You buy a system, and you have access to almost every major game, with as few exceptions as possible. To me though, it's a sad thought, as I sometimes long for a time when there were an assortment of games I couldn't play because I could only afford one system. When that one guy in the neighborhood who bought the Xbox would show us all "Halo" and have us regret our PS2 decision (if only for a moment), or when N64 owners could stretch arguments with their Playstation rivals on into the morning by just dropping the name "Goldeneye" every now and then.

The episode in itself offers a lot of promise for the rest of the announced episode, but it also cuts them short. The next slew of episodes will be adding new story arcs to the new Order of the Stone as they go on new adventures to build up their legacy. That being said, in the two hours it took to finish the episode to its completion, it made the entire premise feel very unimportant. SO much had happened and so much story and character development was involved that Telltale could have made the entire plot itself into a single season if they wanted to. The entirety of Sky City itself has so much more that could have been explored and so many more characters could have been introduced, but the story was limited to a couple of hours of gameplay. It creates a new kind of gameplay that forces you to pay attention and actually play the game rather than just putting your controller down and making a decision every once in a while.


This game becomes quite engaging with friends once everyone gets a hang of how the game is played. Each session of Project Zomboid is rife with danger and thrills, with players ruing the loss of their partners in-game when the going gets tough... which it does. A

See, Mario and Sonic weren't mascots because they fulfilled a certain percentage of demographic requirements or someone felt they could best be easily packed into a happy meal, but rather because they clearly represented exactly what you got with the product their faces were associated with. If you bought Sega, you got Sonic games. If you went Nintendo, Mario was your man.

The age of system mascots and Triple A exclusives may be a fading memory, but it's really no matter, because the one we are about to enter where innovative new ideas and bold risks are rewarded, encouraged, and prized above all may just be the most exciting time ever to be a gamer. All the hype on which system you should buy may be focused on what a system costs, or what it can and can't do in its multimedia capabilities, but trust me when I say that in the end, you'll be keeping an eye on who's got what indie titles all to themselves when deciding which console is right for you.