So I played the first episode (which is currently available for free), and my thoughts pretty much amount to: why is this even a game?
The game is so linear and you have so little control over what is happening that they might have as well made it an animated series. Whenever you ARE given any choices, you usually are heavily restricted in what you can do, and whenever you are allowed to move around, there\'s very little things you can interact with, the area in which you can walk around is extremely limited, and if there are any puzzles, then they have blatantly obvious solutions. There\'s also way, WAY too many Quick Time Events.
The story is pretty good, no doubt about that, but it\'s pretty clear that they took so much time trying to devise a spectacle that they forgot to make it more of a game. What we have here barely goes above the standards of Dragon\'s Lair, which was QTEs and nothing else.
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Not Exactly OUR Story, But... (Spoiler-Free)
As someone who has played a lot Minecraft, I was unsure if Tell Tale Games adding a story to a game that had none was a wise idea. Nevertheless, I wanted to give this title a fair shake.
Note: The time of writing, four out of the five chapters are available.
Gameplay: While I have heard of their work, I had not played a TTG title before, so this was my introduction to their style. In short it is a simple point-and-click adventure with some quick-time segments peppered throughout, and a few simple puzzles. Your choices in the game, within dialogues between characters or interacting with the environment, can change the story either profoundly, aesthetically, or may not be a factor later on as the story progresses, though it is hard to tell which choices matter in a first playthrough. However, the vast majority of these critical choices are easy to make depending on what you want your story to look like.
Story: The adventure centers around the (mis)adventures of Jesse and his/her (This game allows the choice of gender and race, even if it is a limited selection of six possible characters) friends Axel and Olivia, and Reuben the pig, as they find themselves in an unlikely scenario (impossible in vanilla Minecraft: NOT Story Mode). At first the story seems familiar, but it is quickly found out that not everything is what it looks at face-value. Still, the story is pretty easy to follow and the characters love to hammer into your head what you are doing.
The game has a few hiccups when it comes to how it performs due to how quickly the chapters have been coming out from October until December 2015. Examples include characters popping in and out of existence while in frame and lip syncing being a bit awkward.
From what I hear, this is not the best game in TTG's library, but I think it may be a good introduction to them and this generation of point-and-click games.