Wii U players wanting to get their hands on Telltale Games’ Minecraft: Story Mode won’t have much longer to wait: the game arrives on that console this week. The first episode of Minecraft: Story Mode, “The Order of the Stone,” is available on Thursday, Jan. 21 on the Wii U, marking this as the first time that Telltale has launched a game on that system, although the company brought several games to the Wii.
The Wii U version of the game will also have Wii U-specific features, including off-TV play, mirroring and touchscreen controls on the GamePad. Wii U players can buy “The Order of the Stone” for $4.99 from Nintendo’s eShop in both North America and Europe. Additional episodes will arrive soon, with a season pass for all five episodes going for $19.99: this pass allows for instant access to all episodes once they become available.
Minecraft: Story Mode, which is also available on PC, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One, is an interactive point-and-click adventure game similar to Telltale’s other titles, such as The Walking Dead and Tales from the Borderlands. In the game, players must collect items, solve puzzles and engage in dialogue and choices that affect the game’s story and determine its final outcome.
Unlike Telltale’s other titles, though, Minecraft: Story Mode is family-friendly, so decisions made don’t result in character deaths or violent scenes as seen in titles such as The Walking Dead. The game also incorporates crafting and building — features common in Minecraft — into its gameplay. Although Minecraft is not a story-based game, Telltale wanted to create a story around its crafting, building and community themes and felt that Minecraft players wanted something like that.
“Minecraft was a big favorite of ours around the office that presented an opportunity for much more of a blank slate [than Borderlands],” said Telltale’s Job Stauffer to Eurogamer. “You can see that there’s a huge appetite for fans that want to tell stories in the Minecraft world, you can see Minecraft fiction in book stores, some of the biggest YouTube videos ever are Minecraft fiction or Minecraft music videos. Minecraft is so much more than a game. It’s a cultural phenomenon.”
