Lego Voyagers review – sticking together even when miles apart

It’s nice to have a friend. More than one if you’re lucky. My memories of childhood friends are predictably tied to the era: Sunny D, Apple Fruitang, MTV, bikes, and VHS tapes are all there, hanging around the back of my mind. Surprisingly, though, it’s stupidly long walks that I remember most fondly, although rather hazily. Like most kids before they had jobs (a paper round came some years later), we didn’t have much money, and what we did have we wanted to spend on sweets, so we’d often walk miles to avoid getting a bus – we even had a squeaky metal trolley we’d wheel about to carry all our stuff as we ventured to the distant pitch-and-put or tennis courts.

Friendships are different as adults. There’s less time, more commitments, and unwanted organisation, and nary a single chewy sweet or gobstopper in sight (good news that gobstoppers mostly disappeared, to be honest – I have no idea how generations of children were allowed to wallop cricket balls into their mouths without anyone wondering if it was a bad idea). Good friends click into place at any time, though, as if you just saw each other yesterday even if it’s been “way too long”. Anyway, back to this review before I digress even further from the point. I played Lego Voyagers with my son, someone who still remembers what it’s like to not care about anything but the moment, and who sees the joy in heading out to do something, even if that thing hasn’t been neatly detailed in a group WhatsApp. He also hasn’t dealt with friendships drifting as they tend to do, daily pals turning into occasional hellos shared over huge distances.

Lego Voyagers then, the sort-of-sequel to the Light Brick Studio’s Lego Builder’s Journey, is an entirely co-op adventure. Whereas Builder’s Journey asks you to build using Lego bricks to solve movement puzzles in a string of connected but singular dioramas, Voyagers offers up open levels to explore and characters (single red and blue blocks with an eye each, and an ability to shout out twee, nonsensical noises, which somehow makes them seem more alive than their simple shape should allow) who do the building themselves. It makes for a markedly different experience, that feels like more of an adventure with puzzles than a series of puzzles that take you through a story. It’s also one of the best depictions of friendship I’ve seen in a video game, handled with the most beautifully soft touch.

Character in the industry’s most traditional Lego games comes from an exuberant sense of fun and lampooning, the Lego versions of famous heroes and villains playing caricatures, often brilliantly, but more pantomime than West End. Lego Voyagers manages to convey character subtly, using music, sounds, and small movements rather than slapstick. One moment, which proves to be key in the second half of the game, caused my son to become close to rage, but if I were to explain it here it’d seem like nothing at all. Small things, and in this case, bricks, matter.

Voyagers isn’t a difficult game, nor a long one, my son and I clocking just under four hours as we casually made our way to the finale. It heavily promotes working together, though, similar to how my wife might hold a door open while I push the buggy through. Neither task there is difficult (unless you’re dealing with an unusually obstinate door), but attempt to do both on your own and you’ll be reversing into a coffee shop pulling off moves usually reserved for a game of Twister (of course I’ve never played Twister, but I can imagine it!).

This is Lego Voyagers, two friends jumping and rolling through a Lego world, building blocks and activating contraptions in order to continue onwards. Sometimes you simply need to build up bricks to reach a high platform, occasionally you’ll be required to fix something by finding the right Lego bricks, from time to time there are some platforming sequences that rely on using a machine to aid you, there’s a train, a dump truck, and a rocket.

The rocket, parts of which appear on Red and Blue’s idyllic remote island home after a failed launch, is central to the pair’s voyage through the world – finding where it’s manufactured, fixing it up, and eventually much more. It’s the joining tissue in what often feels like a lazy afternoon hangout, a stress-free stroll. Sure, I admit to raising my voice when my son and I had different ideas of what “forward” meant while co-driving a vehicle, and my wife had to put headphones on when we took turns arguing over which of us had the more difficult job flying and landing a miniature space craft, but this is largely a game you move through rather than work through. There’s no peril, no sense of disaster, fear, or worry, just a bit of good natured squabbling. Nothing that a joke or two can’t fix.

As we reached what I saw to be the start of the end of our adventure, I said to my son: “I don’t think you’re going to like what is happening here.” As this panned out, almost exactly as I predicted, I was right. He didn’t like it, but it felt right – the final moments about as perfect as I can imagine this story could be. As a short but sweet puzzle-adventure game, Lego Voyagers handles itself with an air of grace but no snootiness – a game so lovely it’s hard not to feel sad when it’s all over. Look deeper though, or simply from the privilege of age, and it’ll leave a more lasting impression on those of us who know what proper friendship feels like. Sometimes a little “hello” is all you need.

A copy of Lego Voyagers was provided for this review by Annapurna Interactive. A single copy of Lego Voyagers can be played co-op online (via the Friend’s Pass) or on the same console.

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