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I love to build—to put things together. I always have. Whether it’s gunpla, flat
pack furniture or the very video you’re watching right now, the process of creating
something out of nothing, piece by piece, has always been deeply satisfying to me. And
like many kids I’m sure, this love began with Lego. In line with a certain fellow YouTuber,
my experience with these little bricks has less to do with the endless library of expensive,
pristine licensed kits and more just a big ol’ box filled with random bits and bobs
from other packs. What was in there was pure possibility. It
didn’t matter what I was thinking of—if I had the right combination of shapes and
parts, I could create what was in my head. Hell, even if I didn’t have those blocks,
this in itself would lead to some of the most rewarding projects of all. I have such vivid
memories of running through to show my parents the crude approximation of a spaceship I just
built—a ridiculous rectangular mess, but my ridiculous rectangular mess. The product
of imagination and problem solving—those two things I perhaps associate most with Lego.
Doesn’t matter about perfection—just create what’s in your head. Simplicity defined.
And it’s this simplicity that absolutely drives Lego Builders Journey, recently released
on PC and Switch with remarkably limited fanfare after being ported from an Apple Arcade exclusive.
You can feel this purity radiating from the very first screen of the game. Contrary to
the titles you might normally associate with the Lego brand in recent years—the endless
slew of licensed skins to drape over an identical mechanical framework—here you’re just
presented a square. You’re told to place one block on top of another until the tide
washes it away and you start again. It’s a quiet, spacious affair that not only
teaches you the basic controls of the game, but eases you into its atmosphere, as its
characters emerge and the titular journey begins to take shape—in a way that led me
to a fairly odd realisation. Namely that, in the few of these games I’ve played over
the years, and outside of the occasional button press resulting in a feature complete sculpture
automatically emerging before my eyes in seconds… I can’t remember actually building anything
in those titles. See, the simplistic brawling and platforming
of modern Lego games could broadly be defined by their technicolour chaos—where kids smash
through every little interactable object to be found and marvel at the resulting explosions
of pieces. And look, I certainly don’t mean this to come across as some moral panicky
“what are these games teaching our kids” kind of thing—those games are charming in
their own way—but for a series of titles with Lego featuring so prominently as part
of their aesthetic identity, it says a lot that a game sitting me down and asking me
to actually construct something rather than tear it apart felt so… novel, so refreshing
to me. And it’s not like you’re building a 1:1
recreation of the Sistine Chapel or anything. It’s all super simple structures and pathways,
because you’re not playing as master builders here. Instead, the surprisingly heartfelt
little narrative, delivered entirely without words, sees our guardian figure simply trying
to teach a kid how to solve various puzzles with blocks in order to navigate this weird
world—itself hazy and dreamlike, a minimalist blur of shapes and rules.
There isn’t much logic as to how one screen leads to another. Our characters aren’t
even built of the more humanoid pieces you’d expect of people in a Lego world, they lack
facial features or much of anything and yet they remain delightfully expressive. It’s
all indicative of a world as viewed through the eyes of a child; one that hasn’t been
so clearly defined, where there’s still a sense of wonder as to how it all works—it’s
pure potential. When a rockface crumbles underneath our characters,
there isn’t a rush to escape the situation—instead, the guardian stomps and breaks off even more
of the small pillar they’re precariously balancing on; giving the kid a chance to figure
out the way ahead. What should be a perilous situation, in this low stakes Lego world becomes
an opportunity for creativity, for excitement and connection. And then you realise, Builder’s
Journey manages to capture everything I talked about so enthusiastically at the start of
this piece—simplicity, and imaginative problem solving. Moreso than any other game bearing
the brand name, Builder’s Journey is Lego to me.
Just like the beauty of those squared edges of your building materials lies precisely
in the fact that you could rarely get anything looking totally perfect, the beauty of Builder’s
Journey comes from how it lets your imagination fill in the blanks. It very much taps into
that joy of being a kid again—of being able to look at a few small pieces on the floor
and envisioning some elaborate castle. The visual building blocks (for lack of a
better term) might be simple, but this doesn’t stop the environments (and the stories they
tell) from being vibrant and varied. Clear tiles peacefully flow and glisten as a shimmering
stream, juxtaposed with stop motion-esque bubbling swamps; later seeing you tumble into
the dark, dingy depths of the industry that seemingly controls this world—an unknown
entity calling people to work, taking that joy, the colour of creativity and grinding
it down to a repetitive lever-pulling exercise—the blocks you work with now grey and jagged,
reminiscent of some kind of fossil fuel. Instead of that feeling that you’ve created anything
meaningful, you’re given a gold star and expected to feel satisfied with that. There’s
nothing you can build on top of these; their possibility, their potential entirely removed.
All that from some simple blocks. I think this is why the story of passing on the joy
of creativity to the next generation hit me as surprisingly hard as it did—it made me
remember that joy because so much is left to interpretation.
Of course it definitely helps that the game looks as utterly stunning as it does. It’s
clear that the simplicity of the game’s visual palette, despite being built for phones
originally, wasn’t a result of hardware limitations but of vision—behind which lies
some truly astonishing tech (at least on PC), with ray tracing casting such wonderful light
on these blocks; leading to what is definitely up there as one of the best looking games
I think I’ve played. Now we’re in the next gen of consoles you’re
probably hearing that phrase a lot right now but I actually think it’s true in this case.
I’m not sure YouTube compression will do this footage justice but just… look at it.
I don’t know that I’ve seen a game look as convincingly photorealistic as this. At
the very least it represents an incredible marriage between a game’s aesthetic vision
and the tech used to back it up. Given the ray tracing especially, it really
makes me wonder why the big console players outside of Nintendo didn’t snatch this one
up—it’s a visual masterpiece, and the newer machines can handle the technology.
Even past its absence on consoles though, I’m surprised at how little I’ve seen
this game talked about generally—I had no idea about it until an errant demo of the
lighting tech popped up in my recommended feed a few weeks back. At the very least on
a visual level I feel like I should be seeing way more talk about this game than I am—I
really do think it’s a spectacular achievement. That said, thinking more critically, I guess
this radio silence might come down to the fact that, as an actual game, Builder’s
Journey isn’t perfect. The camera controls aren’t exactly what I’d call flexible,
seeing as it’s all designed to be viewed from that one isometric perspective—making
it difficult to get an angle on which blocks you might have at your disposal.
It’s a problem exacerbated by the surprisingly finicky controls for manoeuvring pieces—trying
to line up that one tile in that exact spot you need it is imprecise in a way that I didn’t
expect, leading to a lot of fumbling, turning and throwing bricks across the screen by accident.
You know, given the simplicity of the dioramas you’re presented with here, and for a game
this short, the experience should feel a whole lot smoother than this.
And annoyingly these problems are not merely a matter of control, but of design. Across
the hour or two it’ll take you to beat, the way these puzzles are paced is inconsistent
to say the least—veering wildly between step-by-step “place this block here” affairs
to move the story along, to occasionally fairly satisfying and challenging little brain teasers,
through to scenarios where you can more or less stumble into a solution by clicking randomly.
It’s just complicated enough at times, requiring a modicum of patience and a surprising amount
of lateral thinking to progress (as well as some scenarios that feel completely arbitrary
as to what pieces you can move around vs those that are just part of the environment), that
despite its child-friendly look, I’m not sure I could recommend this to younger players
without supervision—to do so seems like a recipe for frustration.
But then again, as much as this might seem counterintuitive given the branding, I don’t
necessarily think this game is wholly meant for children—I don’t know that its impact
will be so keenly felt by those younger players. I very much envision the builder of the game’s
title as the guardian figure as much as the youngster—the older generation is just at
a different point of their journey. They’ve been through it all—they’ve experienced
this joy, they’ve learned how to make things and, as explored in seemingly any toy-related
media franchise that’s run for long enough (including Lego films, now that I think about
it), they now have to try and pass this knowledge onto the next generation in a world that seeks
to crush the childlike wonder within us all, in order that they can keep that cinder of
joy and hope alive. You know, kids don’t need this game to discover
the joy of Lego, of creating things and using their imaginations, to see the potential in
the everyday world; they have actual physical Lego, and more importantly, time for all of
that. This game is for adults, wearied of the world’s monotony, to bring us back to
a time where we weren’t so painfully aware of life’s indifference; to present us with
renewed perspective so that we may see that potential in things once more. Like our crude
approximations of spaceships and whatever else we’d throw together as kids, Builder’s
Journey is far from perfect, but it’s evocative enough that I’m more than willing to look
past its blemishes and cherish the vision underneath.
So I hope you all enjoyed this piece on Lego Builder’s Journey! This video marks the
6 year anniversary of my very first upload to this channel, and it’s beyond wild to
think it’s been that long. Thank you to everyone who has watched, liked and commented
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and Charlie Yang. And with that, this has been another episode of Writing on Games.
Thank you all so much for watching, stay safe and I will see you all next time.