We first took a look at Lightbrick Studio’s Builder’s Journey back in 2021, and while that game has been updated a couple of times, the announcement of their latest game, LEGO Voyagers, back in June that really piqued my interest. We bought a copy of the game from the Nintendo online store, and sat down with our regular games correspondent, Harry, as we played the game through over the course of a few nights. Read on, below the break, to read his review…

Lego® Voyagers: A Promising Second Title from Light Brick Studios

Lego® Voyagers is an atmospheric puzzle-platformer telling a dialogue-free story about the bond between two characters (and also a robot) which comes to us from Light Brick Studio, who previously brought us Lego® Builder’s Journey, an atmospheric puzzle-platformer telling a dialogue-free story about the bond between etcetera. This time it’s co-op multiplayer though, so you and a partner each play as one half of the main duo. It’s also one of my favorite games I’ve played this year so far, which for those among this audience who aren’t typically plugged into video game news is kind of saying something given how strong releases have been this year.

Unlike Builder’s Journey, which occasionally left the actual details of the narrative intentionally vague and interpretive – I seem to recall one of the developers saying in a round table conversation at the time something like “we’re [making] a poem, more than […] a story” – Voyagers’ narrative is much more coherent. Two friends, Red and Blue, live together on an island and want to build a rocket to go explore space. They recover a bit of rocket that crashes near their house, spend a while re-building it, fly somewhere together and crash, then go on a quest to build a bigger and better rocket. There’s a bit more to it, that I don’t want to spoil, but that’s about the gist of it. What impressed me is that the story still felt immersive and emotionally moving despite being a multiplayer game, which are usually starting from the back foot in that regard because you’ve got another person there constantly reminding you of reality.

I also appreciate the elegance of Voyagers’ puzzle design; I like how they make it so that puzzles require the players to work in tandem to coordinate their actions, rather than just have a bunch of heavy doors that require two people to lift as is de rigueur for a lot of co-op games. While it isn’t above occasionally just giving you a pile of bricks and tell you to build a bridge, the evergreen LEGO game puzzle, it’s got some more creative ones in there too; a particular highlight for me were the sections where each player has one half of the controls for a vehicle which you have to use to navigate a semi-open-ended environment.

The game as a whole isn’t the longest; we got through it in I think four, maybe five hours over several days; a lot of that was faffing about with the design of the rocket at the end, which is solely cosmetic, but parents playing with younger children may find their playthroughs running a bit longer. I think in this instance, the shorter length works to its advantage, because it allows the story and cool set-piece moments to remain impactful without dragging on long enough for you to start to resent your co-op partner, and avoids repeating itself too much.

Dad has asked me to comment on whether I think it has replay value, and while I don’t think this is a useful metric, my short answer is no. If you play it again with someone else, you’ll get annoyed at them for taking too long to figure stuff out and they’ll get annoyed at you for not letting them figure stuff out on their own. Playing it again with the same partner, your mileage may vary. I’d say it still represents good value for money though, and I appreciate that even on PC where you’re not playing locally you only need to buy one copy of the game between you, which at $36.90 AUD is fairly reasonable these days. Having said that, I’m still inclined to recommend the console version over PC, if only for the ability to switch controllers when one player is less adept at the controls and can’t get past a platforming section or something, but more on that later.

I seem to recall one of the criticisms I had from my review of Builders’ Journey was that some mechanics could have used more tutorial time, and that didn’t seem to be as much of an issue this time around. I think the only recurring mechanic that caused any issue was that Dad kept forgetting that after the first act, Blue gets taller and there are switches that only they can activate, but I think that might just have been a skill issue on his part. Outside of that, I can only think of a handful of one-off puzzles where dad and I’s struggle to work out what to do next crossed the line from fun into frustration – the ones that particularly spring to mind are the one with the magnet crane over the conveyor belts and the one with the car after the first time you get off the train.

I do need to take a moment to gripe about the controls. We played the Nintendo Switch version, where aside from movement (controlled by the left stick), everything’s done with the four face buttons (A, B, X, and Y). The controls for ‘rotate the currently held Lego piece 90° clockwise’ and ‘make a cute noise’ each get their own button; ‘jump’ and ‘release the currently held piece’ have to share but that’s fine since you can’t jump while holding a piece anyway. But the fourth button is assigned to pick up the nearest Lego piece (which can include your co-op partner because you’re both 1×1 bricks), and place the currently held Lego piece, and align to the stud grid. This leads to a lot of awkward moments where you pick up a new piece when you wanted to place the one you were holding, or placing your current piece when you wanted to pick up another, or aligning to the grid when you wanted to pick up a nearby piece. The D-Pad, right stick, triggers, and bumpers are all unassigned, but rather than split these controls up a bit like what would make sense, they’re all fixed to one button, I guess for in case they decide to port the game to a garage door remote. Also, some way to specify which of the several nearby pieces I actually want to pick up would make all the difference in the world given how frequently you have to pick pieces out of a big pile. The game practically encourages it by letting you Katamari a bunch of pieces together so that you can (with great effort) roll them all over to where you actually need to build, then ditch them all in a big heap.

Outside of that one thing, which is admittedly kind of a big thing but it’s also the kind of thing they could easily fix (he said, pointedly), it’s an enjoyably challenging puzzle game which both dad and I enjoyed, and it manages the difficult task of standing out as good in a notably strong release year.

Thanks Harry. I’ll have to admit, I enjoyed the game, and seem to have the Henrik Lindstrand’s atmostpheric soundtrack on high rotation at present. You can find LEGO Voyagers on Steam, Epic Games Store as well as for Nintendo Switch, X Box and Playstation. You can find out more about the studio, as well as links to purchase the game, at https://www.lightbrick.com/. You can read Harry’s other LEGO Game reviews here.

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Until Next Time,

Play Well!