Lego Horizon Adventures is a delightful, kid-friendly twist on Horizon Zero Dawn

Horizon Zero Daybreak and Horizon Forbidden West aren’t precisely kid-friendly. Each video games have been rated T for Teen, and I have a tendency to consider them as these high-minded tales about discovered household, billionaire greed, and environmental collapse. So, reinterpreting these tales by plasticky slapstick feels one way or the other disingenuous.

When Lego Horizon Adventures was introduced, I instantly thought, Who requested for this?! Who is that this even for?!

However then I remembered that they’re additionally video games about stabbing gigantic robotic dinosaurs with sticks.

I don’t have youngsters. I do, nevertheless, have a trio of younger nieces and nephews who I am keen on and love sharing video video games with. We hop on FaceTime and I level the digicam on the TV like I’m their very own private Twitch streamer. However I by no means obtained to share both Horizon recreation with them. The video games have been some mixture of too scary or too violent or too boring or too sophisticated — all the issues that made me love them. With Lego Horizon Adventures, although, I can share a narrative I like in a approach that can resonate with them.

Tales matter. Sharing tales issues. And generally these large, impactful, perspective-shifting tales can begin with a single small plastic brick. Generally, a degree of fantastical abstraction is less complicated to face than a tough lesson in regards to the world — say, how a large robotic that eats timber is a neater idea to understand than the all-consuming greed of late-stage capitalism. (And apart from, a robotic is much more stabbable than the idea of an financial system.)

Should you’ve performed any of the Lego video games, you’ve performed Lego Horizon Adventures. You know the way it really works. There’s the tongue-in-cheek reinterpretation of the story, the brick-based reimagining of the world, the dad-joke puns. You run round bite-sized mini ranges doing a little easy platforming, accumulating studs, and preventing enemies as you play as Aloy or one among her allies — whom you unlock as you play by the degrees.

Between ranges, there’s a hub metropolis — Mom’s Coronary heart — the place you possibly can customise the buildings and decorations with unlockable Lego kits. As you progress the story, you’ll unlock kits from Lego Metropolis and Ninjago. At first, how misplaced the Lego Metropolis jail and the development web site have been on the earth of Horizon was jarring. However ultimately, the Lego silliness received out and it stopped being bizarre to stroll previous a Nora statue proper subsequent to a port-a-potty.

Lego Horizon Adventures’ twist comes from its use of Horizon’s weak factors on the machines. Lego Aloy has a Focus that lets her spotlight them similar to human Aloy does. They are often attacked instantly for further injury, which makes for a satisfying improve to Lego video games’ frankly overly easy fight. And the Horizon video games’ elemental injury seems as nicely, with hearth, frost, and shock injury altering how the fights go down.

You battle in opposition to human (minifig) cultists and machines from the Horizon video games’ bestiary that’ve been recreated with Lego bricks. One of many coolest issues in regards to the Lego films is how every little thing is made from Lego items and the way they provide every little thing the phantasm of being buildable with actual, tangible bricks. The world of Lego Horizon Adventures obtained that very same full Lego therapy — from the panorama to the buildings to the tree-eating robots — and it’s beautiful. It’s immersive. It makes the world and its story really feel much less like Lego folks jammed into an unrelated world as a cynical money seize and extra prefer it’s simply telling the (principally) identical story by a special medium.

I like the Horizon video games. And I benefit from the Lego model of recreation with their humor, slapstick, and family-friendly violence. I’m even a fan of the plastic bricks in the actual world and have been for extra many years than I care to confess.

Enjoying (with) Lego doesn’t should be pure escapism. In telling Horizon’s story of environmental collapse and capitalism gone wild, Lego Horizon Adventures places a layer of kid-friendly plastic constructing block abstraction between the ideas and the more and more inevitable actuality. And that makes it not solely manageable, but additionally shareable.