Lego Voyagers

While we might look at the co-op genre and see Hazelight as the uncontested champion, if you give the games allowing you to play alongside a buddy, partner, family member or whoever anything more than a glance, you'll notice some brilliant studios cooking up some great games. Enter Light Brick Studios with Lego Voyagers.

Coming off the back of a beautiful but admittedly short and small puzzle game in Lego Builder's Journey, Light Brick Studios decided to focus a lot more on the journey aspect of its following puzzler Lego Voyagers. Here, we see a pair of tiny, adorable Lego bricks take off on a grand adventure after they see a spaceship crash right outside of their island home.

To make their own spaceship, the pair will have to travel across more islands, some long desert roads, broken train tracks, and more. Light Brick Studios isn't shy of showing off the beautiful visuals it has created for Lego Voyagers, and you'll spot them in every new environment, and every puzzle set piece. The lighting and water effects are especially a treat, and each element of the visual experience feels lovingly hand-crafted. A perfect backdrop to your adventure, particularly when paired with the game's atmospheric soundtrack. Even though it lasts just a few hours, Lego Voyagers feels like an epic because of its visual elements, as you get the sense of a long but enjoyable journey being undertook.

Lego Voyagers is a puzzle game at its heart, with some platforming elements stuck in. Designed largely for families and younger gamers, you shouldn't have too much of a troublesome time with figuring out what you're meant to do. The set pieces are always memorable, yet a good chunk of the mid-game puzzles just boil down to stacking up Lego pieces as high or as long as they'll go so you can jump atop a wall or across a gap. It's not a critique directly, as I only noticed this after completing my adventures, but if you're looking for any real challenge, you probably won't find one here.

Then again, Lego Voyagers doesn't feel like a game intended to give you a challenge. I'm almost certain I "cheated" in some of the puzzles by just building up a chunk of Lego and then trying to force my way over to the next section with some lucky jumps. The use of jumping combined with being able to reach studded ground thanks to being able to click into it with the circle button (or your other platform's equivalent) meant that you could find other, more direct solutions to your problems and ditch traditional solutions. Again, the journey takes precedence in Lego Voyagers, and it's nice that Light Brick Studios didn't try and pad out the game time by making you spend minutes or even hours wracking your head about puzzle solutions.

There's a sense of calm, peace, and overall joy in Lego Voyagers that is hard to shake, but if one thing did bring me out of that immersion it was the sometimes finnicky controls. Clicking into Lego pieces and the studded floor is a bit frustrating at times, as you'll end up picking up the wrong piece or picking up many pieces when you only wanted to grab one. There are also jumping segments where you have to click into pieces or fall and start again, which can be a tad frustrating when your Lego piece only wants to click back into the original stud you jumped from. Nothing proved to be seriously detracting from the overall experience, but it's worth mentioning that finnicky controls might get to you.

The game is also very short. It took me and my fellow Lego Voyager just over 3 hours to beat, which is a bit more than the main campaign for Lego Builder's Journey, but if you're hoping for endless hours of puzzling fun, instead you'll find a more concentrated, story-driven experience here. Whether the length of a game puts you off or not will be up to you, but personally the story feels complete in Lego Voyagers, and to stretch it out further would have likely served only to detract from the emotional peaks, which really hit home. The story of two friends evolves across the course of the game, in directions I'd not anticipated at first, despite them seeming obvious when you look back. It's a great narrative to get stuck into, told with dialogue comprised only of the beeps and boops your Lego characters make when you press the square button.

With visuals that challenge the output of much bigger studios, puzzles that'll keep you entertained without wanting to shatter your controller into tiny pieces, and a story that gives a true sense of adventure, Lego Voyagers is an easy recommendation. It might be short, but it's certainly sweet and will keep you thoroughly entertained in the hours it has hold of you.