Minecraft Story Mode: Episode 3 Review - A Misstep in the Series That is Hopefully Improved Upon in the Next Entry

Written by Stephen Varner on November 29, 2015

Reviews: Jesse and friends trip underground to find a lost hero is not the most pleasant one, and not just because of the endermen.

Minecraft Story Mode thus far has very much been a sort of Saturday morning cartoon approach in terms of both dialogue and context. This holds true for Episode 3 as well and while there were a couple of funny lines to be had here and there my biggest complaint with the series remains in the fact that the talented voice actors simply don't have much to work with.

Episode 3 picks up with Jesse & co. hot on the trail of their last missing hero Soren from The famed Order of the Stone. Their path will be impeded by strange underground machines, creepy endermen and a hero that seems to have come a little unwound in his time away from the world. Most of the actual character drama here plays out early on and centers around one of the gangs' growing affliction revealed in the previous episode. There's an attempt to show how this is affecting others in the group but it's only touched on a little bit. Aside from that thread there's very little for the rest of the group to even say and it left me wondering why they were even there at all. Only one of them has anything to say about an obvious and growing sickness and this made most of the cast here just seem unnecessary.

The actual finding of Soren will lead you through a series of environmental puzzles and crafting sequences that have lost the novelty of being in the world of Minecraft. The crafting bits in particular have become more tedious than anything. As for the rest, I hesitate to call puzzles due to their simplicity. I'd be fine with that aspect of it if I was offered a little more personality than "find 3 switches" in order to progress. The previous two episodes handled that aspect a little better and without much interesting dialogue the entire episode just falls a little flat. The climax here suffers for the lack of character or the total absence of some characters that are billed as important. There's a moment that was clearly intended to deliver the most impact here and it simply didn't. It's tough to care about a character that has been almost completely absent the entire episode and didn't have much to say in the ones previous. Hopefully in the last couple pieces of this story the characters will have a little more to do and say so that their presence is a little more justified.

"The Last Place You Look" is perhaps the weakest part of Minecraft Story mode so far, and a noticeable step back from Episode 2. It ends promising the player a climactic conclusion in the final parts of this story but it'll have some ground to make up given the misstep of this latest episode.