LEGO Builder’s Journey
Year: 2021
Rating: E
Time Played: 133 minutes / 2.22 hours
I’ve played a lot of LEGO games over the years, but none of them quite matched the experience I had when playing through LEGO Builder’s Journey. Early LEGO video games hit a lot of different genres until they settled into the “action adaptation” model that most LEGO games occupied in the early 2000s. Builder’s Journey felt both classic and new in its minimalist puzzle platformer format. It’s only a shame there weren’t more levels to explore, but at least it told a tight story in the few hours it takes to get through it.
Each level of Builder’s Journey conveys a small piece of an overarching narrative that’s communicated without a single word. This kind of storytelling is impressive in its own right, but even more so considering LEGO didn’t lean on the expressiveness of their iconic minifigs. Instead, the characters are made of simple bricks that hop around the bonsai-like models, requiring the player to get them from Point A to Point B in each level. It’s a charming experience and astonishing how expressive these characters can be with their limited movements.
While it only took me a few hours to play through all the levels in this game, the difficulty on a few of the later levels seemed artificially high due to how poorly lit they were. Most solutions were obvious from the get-go, but there were a handful of these puzzles that took a few dozen tries to get right. This weird difficulty spike—while fitting the narrative quite well—felt out of place in an otherwise simple game that even kids could enjoy. Regardless of these few flaws, Builder’s Journey was a refreshing LEGO game after years of “same old, same old.”
A quaint LEGO-based isometric puzzle platformer, I give LEGO Builder’s Journey 4.5 stars out of 5.
1/2
