If you’ve been following the episodic adventures of Minecraft: Story Mode, you’d know throughout each episode that the adventures have gotten either crazier, funnier, more awesome or all of the three combined and then some. Episode 7 of Minecraft: Story Mode, Titled “Access Denied.” follows suit of the wacky and awesome adventures that the New Order of The Stone have been getting in.
Access Denied, Episode 7 of Minecraft: Story Mode cues in with Jesse and company still going through the hallway of portals that they’ve found through Episode 5, “Order Up”. Tensions run high as the group believe that they can’t return home or find the portal at least back to their world, But it slowly calms down when the group finds a redstone portal to a place that they’ve never gone to. Jesse and the group end up taking the redstone portal leading to a desert-mesa like world made of sand and redstone blocks.
The trip unfortunately takes a quick turn of events as they meet a strong mob of zombies that has some kind of weird connector like item on its head. The mob shuts down and begins to walk away, leading Jesse and company to a town where the exact same thing was happening to the townsfolk except one who was just as confused to meet Jesse and his group of adventurers. Mid-interaction later Jesse and company gets swarmed by the controlled townsfolk. Which thus leads meeting the main villain this episode…
PAMA or (Prototype Autonomous Management Agent) for short. You find out that this giant super computer is controlling everything and wanting to make the whole world “useful” as it feels that everyone should be doing something. You’d think that Minecraft: Story Mode would learn from its previous episode in not making the villain too easy to counter or finding a key flaw within its gameplan. Yet its revealed quicker than usual that Water is its weakness and that Paradoxical questions can make it think longer than usual which PAMA flawed humans for in its reveal.
Access Denied plays upon the relationship on the group in a way that’s predictable in the usual telltale choices that we’ve seen from their previous titles. Picking one character of your party over another, the grand decision to make to forgive the villain and wipe away what you’ve been fighting for in typical Telltale fashion.
But the true gem about Access Denied is the relationship development you see between the latest party member who joins you, Harper and the supercomputer PAMA. Being PAMA’s creator Harper hates everything about how PAMA turned out to become. PAMA loves everything Harper related, and thus the clash between the two creates the true story of this episode. While the New order of the stone just seems to really be here.
The dialogue has definitely improved from the previous episodes, nothing too cliche or cheesy that has Jesse immediately going into hero speeches mid issue. The dialogue choices aren’t too bad and Telltale has definitely fixed upon the blunders that’s been happening in the last few episodes where the subtitle would say one thing and one of the characters would be saying something else.
Access Denied certainly focuses on the remaining goal of what the New Order of The Stone is trying to do mainly is which go back home. But they also show what the future of the group can truly be in the end of this episode. Either be stuck to to doing hero work for the remainder of their lives in this portal laced hallway, or actually get home in the next episode. Its all in the air from the way this episode ended especially (Which I won’t spoil.)
