There are few better ways to spend a day than building LEGOs. The feeling that the pieces come together when a pile of plastic bricks becomes a monumental work is incredibly satisfying in a way that digital representations are not always able to reproduce. So while most recent LEGO games have instead found success being goofy action playwrights with licensed connections, LEGO Bricktales going in a completely different direction. It ditches pop culture characters and co-op combat in favor of an original story with build-based puzzles. It’s not quite like real-life LEGO construction, but it comes pretty close – even if you’re fighting with the camera or the mission objectives are obscured.
In LEGO Bricktales, you’re a brick man tasked with helping his eccentric grandfather power the amusement park he apparently resides in before it shuts down. Think of Doc Brown from Back to the Future, but instead of an improved DeLorean, Grandpa’s built a portal to take you to faraway lands. Your mission: help the locals on a handful of biomes and collect Happiness Crystals, which can be used as a power source for amusement park attractions. Helping an archaeologist explore a jungle temple, find a long-lost pirate vessel, and save a kingdom rife with poisoned farmers are all part of the day’s work. you are trying to restore Grandpa’s park to its former glory.
Each LEGO Bricktales level is designed to look like a detailed diorama when scaled down, reminiscent of Captain Toad’s levels in Super Mario 3D World. Unlike many of the most popular LEGO games, there’s no platforming or combat here. Instead, LEGO Bricktales combines exploration and building puzzles for a more grounded approach – as well as essentially jumping into a portal and emerging in ancient or medieval Egypt. while developing special abilities such as generating electricity is possible.
These puzzles often require building something out of LEGO to proceed, whether it’s stairs, an observation tower, or an amusement park attraction. Developer ClockStone is best known for the Bridge Constructor series, so it’s not entirely surprising that many of LEGO Bricktales’ puzzles also involve building bridges to carry characters across abysses. You do this just like you do with physical LEGO sets: brick by brick.
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Just like in real life, building these works can be amazing. It is not an open sandbox; Each of these puzzles has a limited number of bricks with different shapes and certain parameters that must be met, such as height and width limits. Common sense and physics apply here, so bridges must be reinforced and solid, paths must be clear, and anything floating in the air needs to be properly balanced. Before you can finish any work, you’ll have to run a test run to make sure it doesn’t break instantly under the weight of your test subjects (who happen to be adorable cyborgs) .
These segments are LEGO Bricktales’ strongest point, but they can also be its biggest weakness. It is incredibly rewarding to put together a challenging structure and then see it in the world and use it as intended, but achieving goals is sometimes more frustrating than fun. It’s not always obvious why something you’ve built isn’t working properly; At one point, I spent over an hour building and rebuilding the fire escape only to watch the test robots repeatedly plunge to the ground as my stairs collapsed. It is possible that you are missing a single piece needed for reinforcement, or the entire structure may not be sturdy. It would have been easier to figure out if the camera controls were any better, but I felt like I was fighting them for better viewing angles the whole process.
The camera is easily my biggest annoyance with LEGO Bricktales, both during its building segments and while exploring. During the latter, you cannot control the camera and move at the same time; To zoom out and get a full view of the area, you’ll need to pause the action altogether. This makes finding hidden nooks and crannies like a chore at times, which isn’t ideal as LEGO Bricktales encourages you to head off the beaten path to find collectibles. Thankfully, you have more control while building, but it can still be difficult to place the pieces the way you want, let alone get the right view of what is causing the problem.
After completing a building puzzle, you can go back and rebuild it in sandbox mode, which relaxes the rules a bit and allows you to use additional pieces in a variety of colors and styles vary, but there’s no real incentive to do this. I wish for the first time I’d seen more of the creativity and weirdness on display in these challenges, instead of repeating the same group of basic white, gray, and brown pieces over and over. To be fair, the puzzles match the color palette of the environment, so you’re unlikely to find a raft held together by brown pieces representing the wooden slabs while you’re on the beach. . Not every puzzle needs to be bursting with unique materials and unicorn rainbow aesthetics, but having some more variety goes a long way.
All that said, it’s easy to put these distractions aside and just enjoy the adventure. Go back and visit the old areas once you’ve unlocked new abilities in the theme park that allow you to find treasures you were previously inaccessible to. It’s similar to other LEGO games in that it encourages exploration, and the collectibles – ladybugs, hermit crabs, rabbits, etc. – are motivating enough to reread familiar ground. Even if you’re not a perfectionist, the story takes around 12-15 hours to complete, with plenty of plot, humor, and cheeky references to keep things interesting. As an added bonus, LEGO Bricktales ran smoothly on the Steam Deck, and back and forth from PC to my couch aided by cloud save made the adventure even more enjoyable.
