Minecraft: Story Mode – Episode 7: Access Denied is yet another installment in the Telltale / Mojang mash-up series that doesn’t really feel beholden to the rest of the series. It’s enjoyable on its own and requires very little (if any) experience with the previous adventures of the new Order of the Stone. The series appears to have settled into a new format, one that has the slightest hint of a core narrative thread and no other connective tissue holding the newer episodes together. I personally think it works, even if it is incongruous with how it all began. If you played Episode 5 and Episode 6, you have a good idea of what you’re getting into: a new adventure in a new world with some new characters – and new challenges to face.

Minecraft: Story Mode – Episode 7: Access Denied begins with a montage; if the previous adventures of Jesse and the gang weren’t enough to convince you, the opening credits hammer it in without a shred of ambiguity. Our heroes are sick and tired of wandering the portal network and just want to go home. Tensions rise a bit, and some unnecessary drama plays out, but regardless of how you resolve it, the group ends up entering a portal which leads them to what they think is an abandoned mesa biome. But when a group of harmless zombies with strange red chips on the back of their heads leads them to an apparent ghost town, things get a bit weird. An eccentric new character is introduced: Harper, one of the mythical Old Builders. She’s easily one of the best characters seen in the show yet, and she doesn’t even get that much screen time. Instead, you get to discover her personality and her tragic past through the act of exploration and investigation.

Through a series of bizarre encounters, our heroes discover that nearly every living creature in this world is under the direct control of PAMA, a supercomputer that seems content to be yet another footnote in the history of artificial intelligences gone wrong. With the help of those fancy red chips, PAMA is able to assume direct control and make them "useful" – that key term meaning, well, whatever PAMA wants it to mean. And when Jesse and company arrive on the scene, the computer finds its databanks reeling with the possibilities of other worlds, each full of individuals who could be so much more useful than they are. Of course, you know where this is going, and if you have any experience with either modern science fiction or this series as a whole, you probably have a very good idea of how it’s going to end up.

Minecraft: Story Mode has been a confounding but ultimately worthwhile stretch of episodes. At first, it seemed like any other Telltale experience: a strictly-structured, dialogue-driven experience that followed a specific narrative line. But when the fourth episode ended what was, for all intents and purposes, the main conflict, it seemed as if the developers wrote their way into a corner. With the announcement of a new batch of episodes and a shift in structure, the series transformed itself from a serial adventure into a smattering of totally unrelated adventures. It’s almost a certainty that it won’t re-establish a sense of cohesiveness by the next (and final?) episode of the series, so it’s probably best to look at the first four and the final four episodes as seasons in and of themselves. And while ultimately I don't think these latest episodes are as good as the ones that came before, they are still quality products that are worth your time and money.