Lego Voyagers review: "A carefully crafted, playful, and earnest adventure"

Lego Voyagers from developer Light Brick Studio, the same folks behind the critically acclaimed Lego Builder's Journey, lives up to its pedigree with a carefully crafted, playful, and earnest adventure focusing on two friends (represented by blue and red Lego bricks with an eye, controlled by two different players) reclaiming and restoring a spaceship.

There are basically two schools of thought when it comes to gameplay design in a Lego game: there are the IP-based games where Lego is a blank slate to paint with Batman or Star Wars or Marvel, and then there are the games that specifically lean into the nature of play and discovery and building something from nothing. While not entirely steeped in the latter, Lego Voyagers certainly leans that way more than not.

Functionally, two players must navigate through a series of puzzles by activating switches, climbing, jumping, and generally building Lego bricks together or breaking them apart in various ways. It's an entirely nonverbal affair, though the little player-representing blocks can make sounds when you hit a button. For the most part, these are meaningless inflections, but they can also be something else entirely depending on context. (My partner and I would not stop making both go CHOO CHOO as noisily and as frequently as possible when we realized it had changed upon boarding a train.)

If you're looking for a lengthy experience or something more freeform, Lego Voyagers is not for you. It's linear, start to finish, and took me and my partner (who is not particularly skilled at platforming and therefore not a natural fit for the title) roughly four to five hours to complete over two sessions. It's interesting enough to roll around and experience the game's brief narrative, but I have a hard time imagining returning to Lego Voyagers, now that I've completed it, for any reason other than introducing it to somebody new.

Built to solve

While charming and easy enough to logic your way through, Lego Voyagers does contain a couple of skill-based difficulty spikes that are shocking considering how gentle the game is about failure otherwise. If you accidentally roll off the edge into the abyss, you're pretty much immediately transported right back to the base you fell from. The isometric camera sometimes makes jumps – the judging of distance and depth – tricky, so a quick reset is much appreciated.

But a couple of puzzles require some careful coordination between both players to complete. This experience is perhaps colored by my co-op partner not being particularly gifted at this sort of game, but even with that caveat considered, three or so puzzle solutions still stick out like Duplo among Lego. And it's not even that they're bad puzzles; we did solve them in the end, but it was a genuine challenge compared to the vast majority of the game's puzzles, which I would describe as "thinkers" but not exactly difficult.

Also, to be clear, while my co-op partner isn't great at this sort of game, they are someone I know extremely well and have for over a decade – and we were playing on the couch next to each other, strategizing over every decision and discussing what bricks to grab, where to play them, what switches to pull when, and so on. Lego Voyagers co-op can also be done online, and I cannot fathom how you'd actually get anything done without an additional layer of voice chat. Roll around on objectives and make pitchy in-game grunts constantly? Some of the more timing-relevant puzzles don't have, well, time for that.

These are minor complaints in the grand scheme of things, and Lego Voyagers' "grand scheme" being less than half a dozen hours makes them even more minor. The closest comparison I have for the experience of playing through Lego Voyagers might be a nice bowl of stew or a page from my daily puzzle calendar. Like a lunch of stew, playing Lego Voyagers is good, and satisfying, and by and large to my expectations, but it's not exactly filling. Alternatively, like my daily puzzle, it's nice to put some effort into the logic without any real concern about being right or wrong.

The stakes in Lego Voyagers boil down to, "it takes longer to do." If you can't figure out a given solution, you just… keep trying. Take as long as you want. Take 15 hours to play, if you want, nobody's really counting, anyway. Sometimes it's nice to play a game that fundamentally understands it's about the journey, but it doesn't hurt that Lego Voyagers has a pretty good ending as well.

The stealthy spirit of Arkham Knight returns in Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight, and I never believed a Lego game could pull this off