Few ever thought that Minecraft would get a story. The game was so intrisically built on player experience that any sort of traditional video game narrative seemed silly - Minecraft was all about playing around in a big, open world, not sitting through cutscenes and quicktime events.
That's when Telltale Games - the same studio behind the amazing Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us adaptations - appeared out of nowhere, proudly proclaiming that they'd be giving Minecraft a proper narrative. The aptly-titled Minecraft: Story Mode came out soon after, and to everyone's surprise, the game proved that the blocky world simulator could have a story and still be fun.
As one would expect from any product with the word 'Minecraft' in the title, Story Mode did well enough to warrant a sequel...and then five more sequels after that. Telltale is now prepping to launch the game's seventh episode - which means that anyone who still hasn't played the game will have some serious catching up to do.
Thankfully, Microsoft is making it easy to jump in and start playing: as part of the Microsoft Store's latest batch of discounts, the first episode of Minecraft: Story Mode is now 100% free for everyone!
Better yet, there's no catch or hoops to jump through: all anyone needs to do in order to grab the game for free is simply set up a Microsoft account and log into the store. It's a similar deal to Microsoft's recent (and somewhat random) anime sale, which saw the entire first season of Dragon Ball Z receiving a 100% discount.
For anyone who's already played through the first episode, the rest of the game is also available for cheap: the individual episodes are just $2.49, while the Season Pass and Season Pass Deluxe are $9.99 and $19.99 respectively. It's not the biggest discount ever, but it's nice that players can pick and choose how much of an investment they want to make in the series.
Of course, it's not just Minecraft: Story Mode that's on sale: Microsoft has also discounted its Groove Music service, select movie rentals and a Minecraft: Windows 10 Edition map among others. Anyone who wants to check out the sale for themselves can see all of the available discounts over at the official Windows blog.
All things considered, now is the best time to jump into Minecraft: Story Mode - not only can players get the game for cheap, but they won't have to wait much longer for the next episode!
Minecraft: Story Mode - Episode 7, Access Denied is due out on July 26.
