Playing with LEGO blocks inspires creativity and imagination, and it’s an easy experience to share with others — I’m sure you have your own memories of building with friends and loved ones. When LEGO play becomes a group activity, the elements of collaboration and additional problem-solving are factored in. This is what LEGO Voyagers is all about.
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Developed by Light Brick Studio, which made the wonderful single-player puzzle game LEGO Builder’s Journey, LEGO Voyagers takes much of the same design and visual philosophy and applies it to a cooperative narrative. This co-op puzzle game captures that spirit of imagination and collaboration at the core of LEGO, while crafting a sweet and emotional story.
LEGO Voyagers also feels inspired by the mini-renaissance of cooperative video games led by It Takes Two and Split Fiction creator Hazelight Studios, and this title deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as those two acclaimed games. Despite some minor blemishes, LEGO Voyagers produces joy and nostalgia that anyone who loves co-op experiences — along with an affinity for plastic bricks — should play.
Rating: 4/5
| Pros | Cons |
| A gorgeous minimalist aesthetic with charming characters and environments | Occasional glitches, some of which required restarts |
| An emotionally resonant story | Controls for certain mechanics later in the game were a bit sloppy |
| A set of co-op puzzles that become more elaborate and test communication |
LEGO Voyagers Lets You Build Your Own Narrative (Somewhat)
LEGO Voyagers follows two friends who travel far and wide on a journey to fulfill their dreams of becoming astronauts. At least, that’s the most basic and obvious read I got on the story. Very much like LEGO Builder’s Journey, Light Brick Studio takes a minimalist approach to the game’s narrative, lacking any dialogue and telling the story solely through visuals.
And it’s a great approach for a LEGO co-op game, because it gives players the space to craft their own narrative based on their own interpretations and even their personal experiences. It’s obvious that these two characters are close — are they friends, siblings, or something more? Are they young children going on an adventure way beyond their scope, or are they mischievous teenagers looking to vandalize a space station?
Regardless of how you view the story, the visuals of LEGO Voyagers are gorgeous, with characters and environments that appear tangible thanks to glossy textures and realistic light and reflections. The character designs are lovingly basic, with the players controlling two tiny rectangular LEGO pieces, each with one eye.
You can freely roll around and jump, and they speak in grunts and other fun exclamations, which you can activate with a press of a button, but their noises might be prompted by contextual action, like high-pitched squeals after a big fall or a sound of amazement at an awe-inspiring rocket launch. It’s impossible not to smile at how cute this game is.
Puzzles Start Simple But Increase In Complexity
LEGO Voyagers is a relatively short game, taking somewhere between three to five hours to hit credits. And very much like Hazelight’s co-op games, LEGO Voyagers lets one co-op partner play through a free friend pass, provided that the other player owns the game.
The two main components of Voyagers are puzzle solving and play. The basic rhythm of the game is getting from one place to another, and many of the first puzzles consist of making bridges with LEGO pieces to cross gaps. In between, there are optional moments of play that have no bearing on your progress, but it’s hard not to resist these vignettes, like swinging on a swing set or finding a machine that spins and launches you a distance (although as a bonus, these moments often reward achievements/trophies).
With the game’s lack of dialogue, Voyagers never explicitly tells you what to do, and figuring out what your objective is and how to approach it is a puzzle in itself. Often, you’ll make a breakthrough because you’re playing around with the environment and every object in your vicinity, discovering how mechanics work and building conclusions on how to use them.
Later puzzles involve a lot more timing and coordination, and a couple of sections require both players to control separate operations of a vehicle, such as a boat or forklift. For the most part, puzzle design in LEGO Voyagers is largely successful — one issue with Lego Builder’s Journey was that some of the puzzles were too esoteric and confusing, and they could be solved just by jiggling around with the pieces without any logic until they produce the correct result. But in LEGO Voyagers, solutions are a lot more attainable, and success feels very rewarding.
Minor Technical Issues and Lack of a Post-Game Disappoint
Without spoiling where the later parts of the story take you, the game does have sections where puzzles take a pause, and you are free to build using a selection of pieces. While it’s great that LEGO Voyagers gives an opportunity for free-form creativity, the controls can be a bit wonky, as picking up, letting go of, and placing pieces can all get tangled up. It’s hard to get pieces exactly where you want them, and I often found myself accidentally sticking to unneeded pieces like a Katamari.
There were also two occasions where I hit game-breaking bugs — both involved one or both players falling off the environment but getting stuck in an object, making it impossible to instantly respawn on the ground, as the game usually lets you do. These required me to reset progress from the beginning of the chapter. Fixed camera angles also make building a bit of a frustration, as it’s difficult to discern where you’re placing pieces, and the dynamic camera sometimes fails to accommodate both players if they’re too spread out.
None of these issues ruined the experience as a whole, and it was easy to accommodate the small technical blemishes. But after rolling credits, I was left with a desire for more. As sweet as the story’s ending was, some sort of free-building mode would have been perfect to extend my time with the game. LEGO Builder’s Journey received a bit of DLC, so fingers crossed that the same will happen for Voyagers.
LEGO Voyagers Is A Brief But Worthwhile Feel-Good Adventure
LEGO Voyagers is the most obvious recommendation for anyone seeking a comforting and bonding experience with another player. With its short length, it should make for a fun weekend gaming session. It’s the video game equivalent of eating a sweet dessert.
It’s a game brimming with positivity without being sentimental, and one that highlights creativity and communication without requiring excessive brain power. We’re lucky to have several cooperative-focused video games of high quality to choose from, and LEGO Voyagers is undoubtedly the most pleasant and delightful one out there.
ComicBook was provided with a PlayStation 5 code for the purposes of this review.
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