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 had 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 via plasticky slapstick feels someway 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 children. I do, nonetheless, have a trio of younger nieces and nephews who I like and love sharing video video games with. We hop on FaceTime and I level the digital camera on the TV like I’m their very own private Twitch streamer. However I by no means bought to share both Horizon sport with them. The video games had been some mixture of too scary or too violent or too boring or too difficult — all the issues that made me love them. With Lego Horizon Adventures, although, I can share a narrative I like in a means that can resonate with them.

Tales matter. Sharing tales issues. And typically these huge, impactful, perspective-shifting tales can begin with a single small plastic brick. Typically, a stage of fantastical abstraction is less complicated to face than a tough lesson concerning the world — say, how a large robotic that eats bushes is a better idea to understand than the all-consuming greed of late-stage capitalism. (And moreover, a robotic is much more stabbable than the idea of an financial system.)

If you happen to’ve performed any of the Lego video games, you’ve performed Lego Horizon Adventures. You understand how 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 performing some simple platforming, amassing studs, and combating enemies as you play as Aloy or one in every of her allies — whom you unlock as you play via 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 had been on the planet 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 immediately 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 properly, with hearth, frost, and shock injury altering how the fights go down.

You struggle towards human (minifig) cultists and machines from the Horizon video games’ bestiary that’ve been recreated with Lego bricks. One of many coolest issues concerning the Lego films is how the whole lot is fabricated from Lego items and the way they provide the whole lot the phantasm of being buildable with actual, tangible bricks. The world of Lego Horizon Adventures bought that very same full Lego remedy — 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 individuals jammed into an unrelated world as a cynical money seize and extra prefer it’s simply telling the (largely) similar story via a unique medium.

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

Enjoying (with) Lego doesn’t must 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.