Having now played about an hour of Lego Horizon Adventures, it feels like a game with great ideas that are restricted by the IP it’s based on. I love the world of Horizon Zero Dawn and Horizon Forbidden West, but the opening hour of Lego Horizon often feels like its setting and characters are clashing with the comedic creativity and gameplay loop that so many Lego games excel at. The opening hour of Lego Horizon feels like a pretty decent start to what’s hopefully a good game–at the very least, it’s shaping up to be my favorite Lego game in terms of visuals–but there are moments where I could see the kid-friendly vibe of the Lego games conflicting with the more adult-oriented storylines of Horizon.
Lego Horizon is a loose retelling of Aloy’s first adventure, in which the bow-wielding protagonist utilizes an assortment of hunting tools and high-tech gadgetry to fight mechanical dinosaurs, mammals, and birds in a world that feels both like a forgotten past and unforeseen future of our own. Aloy, mysteriously birthed from a mountain and subsequently made an outcast, desires to prove herself capable of joining the tribe that cast her out and returning to the mountain to uncover the truth about her origins.
“From the beginning when we started the conversations with [Guerrilla Games], they were very clear,” Studio Gobo animation director Luismi Herrera told me. “They wanted to bring the Horizon series to a broader audience, and they thought that the best way was to retell the story of the original game, the Horizon Zero Dawn game. But obviously we started to go as a fairy tale, a light-hearted version of it, because obviously there are a bit more mature things for that game. It was like, ‘Okay, how can we retell this story, keeping all the core values and everything, with this Lego universe?’ And that’s been the goal. That being said, the core story is the same, it’s [just a retelling] in a light-hearted way.”
Horizon Zero Dawn is a good story, but not one that seems to translate well to the structure of a Lego game. Each Lego game is built on a backbone composed of beloved characters, well-remembered locations, and memorable scenes that fans of the original IPs have talked, argued, and joked about for years. Horizon Zero Dawn doesn’t have that. As much as I enjoyed the game, I can’t really remember any of the characters beyond Aloy, can’t point to any specific locations in the game as being especially memorable, and despite how cool some of the late-game reveals are, there aren’t too many moments in the story that stand out with the same cultural milestones seen in Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, or Marvel and DC Comics.
As a result, Lego Horizon’s jokes don’t pack the same level of cheekiness I’ve come to love in other Lego games, nor did the first hour of the story include any moments that had some of the incredible self-referential humor that the Lego games have excelled at since 2005’s Lego Star Wars: The Video Game. And again, I only played about an hour of Lego Horizon, which covered the opening moments of Horizon Zero Dawn, arguably the weakest part of that game. Much in the same way Horizon Zero Dawn gets a lot better after its opening, it’s quite possible that Lego Horizon does as well–many of the past Lego games get better after their opening levels once more of their mechanics become available to you. There were moments in that first hour that made me chuckle, and although I want to fully laugh out loud when playing a Lego game, the brief chuckles could be a good indication that Lego Horizon will surprise me in the same way past Lego games have. Still, I’m a tad worried for the ending of Lego Horizon, as it will be building on the emotional gut-punches that occur in the final hours of Horizon Zero Dawn. Horizon Zero Dawn is a lot of things, but funny it is not.
“It’s been very challenging [to include those emotional moments] for sure,” Herrera said. “But I would say, without giving any spoilers, there are some cinema narrative points that you can ‘break’ a bit, right? I think it’s in a very light-hearted way–I think the core values [are still there] but it’s about this journey for Aloy and to discover what she is and I think that’s really relatable. It doesn’t matter if you’re six years old or 60 years old. So the whole story is there, but when things get very serious, we try to make it fun. It’s not heavy, but we are trying not to lose any of the core message.”
Still comparing Lego Horizon to other Lego games, on the reverse side, the opening hour of the game surpasses its contemporaries when it comes to visuals. Up to this point, the Lego games have primarily only made their characters Lego. Aspects of the environment (like bushes or doors) or weapon effects have sometimes also been made of Lego bricks, but the floor your character walks on and the walls of buildings typically aren’t–they’re the worlds of the IP filled with Lego creations. Not so for Lego Horizon. The entire in-game world is composed of Lego pieces, making Lego Horizon look like a Lego set brought to life. It’s incredible and visually stunning, setting a new standard that I hope all future Lego games follow.
That [idea] actually came from when we met with Guerrilla,” Herrera said. “They had an idea of what they wanted to do–they had already had conversations with Lego and they had a pretty strong idea of what they wanted. And obviously you know Guerrilla; they aim for excellence in everything they do. So they–all of us, really–wanted to make the best Lego game ever. One of the ideas was to try to make the player feel that they were playing with a real Lego set.”
Herrera continued: “And to do that, we had to build the whole world out of Legos. And in fact, we have a team of Master Builders–they’re not working on the video games, they’re experts on Lego to help us to build every single thing in the game to the degree that anything that you see in the game can be built with real-life Lego. [They had a lot of] overview on things, like ‘Okay, now that’s an illegal brick, so [we] can’t use that anymore.’ We were just replacing things. We really spent lots and lots of time investment on making it as real as possible. Even the amount of colors [is realistic], as the palettes have to be the same colors that you can [find with real] Lego [bricks] and can build physically. So everything is being built from the beginning with that in mind, to try to make you feel like you’re playing a real Lego set.”
If we ignore comparisons to other Lego games, Lego Horizon feels like a decent-enough experience. The game attempts to combine the stealth mechanics of Horizon Zero Dawn with the arcade-y action of the Lego games for middling results. Aloy and her allies can hide in tall grass to sneak about a space and aim shots at specific weak points on the mechanical monstrosities that populate each stage, carving off parts of each enemy until it ultimately has no leg to stand on (sometimes literally) and collapses into lifeless Lego pieces. It’s fine. There’s no real strategy to it even on the hardest of the game’s five difficulty settings (at least of what I played) and so each fight seems to play out exactly the same again and again. Clearly, Lego Horizon is aimed at a younger audience than me (just like previous Lego games), so I’m probably not going to get the depth of strategy and difficulty found in Horizon Zero Dawn. That does beg the question, of course, as to who Lego Horizon is for. It seems too easy and simple for adults hoping to relive Horizon Zero Dawn, unless you’re a parent desperate to share that experience with your child.
“There is a desire to broaden the Horizon franchise to a broader audience,” Guerrilla Games design director Stephane Varrault told me. “[Lego Horizon Adventures] is a perfect opportunity to make [Horizon Zero Dawn] available to all people, but that doesn’t mean that it’s only available to kids. We have done several things. There’s this layer to the narrative so that things are focused for a younger audience, but the humor can be more mature humor.”
There’s a longer conversation to be had about this that is beyond the scope of this preview, but Lego Horizon is an odd combination of ideas. The Horizon franchise feels too adult for Lego Horizon to be a gateway for children into the franchise (I just can’t see an eight-year-old immediately jumping from Lego Horizon to Horizon Zero Dawn and Horizon Forbidden West) but at the same time, the established format of gameplay found in many past Lego games doesn’t feel like something that fans of the Horizon franchise are looking for. It’s completely plausible that this all comes together in a great way in the full game, but based on what I played through in the first hour, I just don’t see it.
Regardless, I hope that later levels of Lego Horizon feature a wider variety of enemies to spice up combat, and that the structure of the game evolves beyond what I played in the first hour, in which I kept returning to a village that acted as a hub area where I didn’t have much to do between missions. And those missions saw me venturing out in levels that aesthetically looked very similar and featured pretty much the same handful of enemies and puzzles but in a slightly different order each time. It’s tough to judge a game’s variety based on its opening hour, but if Lego Horizon doesn’t change beyond what I played, I could see it growing stale quite quickly.
“There is a lot to discover,” Varrault clarified. “An essential part of the game is to rebuild the village, narratively, but also in terms of features that you will discover and you can go through really great lengths to customizing every decoration, every building, you can even change the color palette of each item. You can build individual [buildings], you can change the outfits of every NPC. You can also change the outfits of your main characters and those outfits, they stay during the cutscenes. You can have those funny moments where you have those outfits totally contrasting with the events. So there are a lot of tiny surprises in a lot of the buildings and much you can build. They also have specific animations. Again, we won’t spoil [anything] because the fun is in experimenting. I don’t want to spoil too much because I think [surprise] is also part of the joy of discovery, but the village and the rebuilding of the village will have opportunities for growth.”
Varrault continued: “And in terms of activities, a lot of the focus was also [on how] you’re going to go through different biomes. And the idea is that each biome, they have their own set of machines. So again, new things for you to discover. So I think our expectations are that, yes, players experiment, players try to discover as much as they can, because we really put a lot of attention to all the tiny details and the surprises.”
Unlike other Lego games that feature dozens (and sometimes hundreds) of playable characters from their respective brands, Lego Horizon only has a handful of playable options. Each character features tons of costumes that you can dress them up in, but, again, you can see how Horizon isn’t a typical IP for a Lego game–the original Horizon games don’t have a huge roster of memorable characters. To account for that, Lego Horizon gives each playable character a different attack and unique skill tree that can be unlocked. Aloy specializes in a bow that can hit targets from afar, for example, while Varl uses a spear that he can use to dash forward for a more close-range fighting style. I didn’t really see how these two different characters could evolve over the course of the game or if there were meaningful differences between the two, but it’s possible a bit more strategy could pop up there.
“The intention, right from the beginning, was [thinking], ‘If we consider those characters in the Horizon universe, they are, of course, different narratively speaking so they also represent different ways to experience the world as [the player] progresses through it,'” Varrault said. “So we spent a lot of time interacting on this–each character has a different weapon and they also have a dedicated set of power-ups that can make their weapon more powerful or have a different effect. They all have their own progression track as well. Aloy, she can get, let’s say, additional life or boosters on the damage, for instance, or she’s able to prepare her shots faster. And the same goes for the other characters too. So the idea was if you stick with one character, there’s room for you to progress and room for you to expand. Of course, you are welcome to try different characters, but it’s also okay if you find a play style that suits you and you just want to develop that. The game is supporting both approaches. So it was really a clear intention right from the beginning that we offer this palette of possibilities.”
Based on my conversation with Herrera and Varrault, there seems to be a lot to Lego Horizon Adventures that I just didn’t get to see because it exists beyond the opening hour. I’m hopeful my first impression of the game isn’t one that continues when I get to play the full experience. As someone who has loved the Lego games since the mid-2000s and has a soft spot for Aloy and the Horizon series, a game like Lego Horizon Adventures should be a slam dunk for me. I’m still worried that the nature of Horizon Zero Dawn doesn’t lend itself well to translating to the formula used in Lego games, but I’m hopeful Guerrilla Games and Studio Gobo manage to find a way to make it all come together after the bumpy opening hour. A more kid-friendly property like Insomniac’s Spider-Man and Ratchet and Clank, or Team Asobi’s Astro Bot would have likely made for a better Lego game, but if Lego Horizon Adventures works out, this could be a method PlayStation uses to help its more adult-oriented franchise be more approachable for younger audiences.
Lego Horizon Adventures is scheduled to launch for PS5, PC, and Switch on November 14.