For years, I’ve been trying to get my gaming-agnostic partner engaged in one of my favorite pastimes. But aside from dabbling in Overcooked and a playthrough of Until Dawn (me holding the controller, her making the decisions), I’ve never found a game that stuck. That was until we tried Lego Voyagers, the new co-op game from developer Light Brick Studios.
This new puzzle-platformer takes clear cues from the acclaimed work of Hazelight, developer of It Takes Two and Split Fiction, and is a simple but charming adventure where you play as two 1×1 Lego bricks on a quest through a gorgeous plastic world. It’s certainly not going to challenge experienced players, but for newcomers to the hobby, it’s an excellent entry point to a world of entertainment that millions of people, including myself, truly love.
Taking things brick by brick
Lego Voyagers has a simple, no-frills setup. It’s a mandatory co-op experience that has you and a partner, family member or friend, each play as a small Lego brick. One blue, the other red. After starting your journey on the beach, you venture through a Lego world to find the launch site of a rocket ship, and that’s pretty much all there is to the rudimentary setup.
Each of the two 1×1 bricks is given some personality via a googly eye and the ability to press a dedicated “sing” button, which makes your selected plastic avatar hum a whimsical note. But otherwise, the actual story is minimalistic and merely a vehicle for various gentle puzzles and platforming sections, which never even come close to thumb-testingly tricky.
In fact, there are only two buttons for players to wrap their fingers around: jump and attach. The former is self-explanatory, and the latter isn’t particularly tricky to understand for anybody who’s played with the Danish building blocks either. At the press of a button, you can attach your Lego brick to various objects, or even stick yourself to your co-op partner.
These moves are used to solve simple puzzles, which range from activating switches that create platforms across a precarious canyon to slightly more involved puzzles like jointly piloting a boat or moving a satellite dish into place. There’s no combat or any form of punishment for “death.” Fall off a ledge or mistime a jump, and you’ll instantly respawn.
Many puzzles require you to build structures, usually bridges, which is as simple as sticking your Lego bricks to a couple of plastic planks and cobbling together a way across to your destination. Yes, it’s all very simple, but that’s clearly intentional, as Lego Voyagers is designed with younger (or inexperienced) gamers in mind, and it succeeds in this regard.
On PS5 Pro, the game also looks absolutely gorgeous. The whole world is made up of Lego bricks, and it really does feel like stepping inside a plastic diorama. Voyagers uses the same visual style as 2019’s Lego Builder’s Journey, and it’s remarkably lifelike and wonderfully quaint.
Lego Voyagers is built for inexperienced players
I imagine a pair of experienced gamers could find Lego Voyagers rather dull. There’s little mechanical depth to speak of, and the puzzles aren’t going to have you deep in thought for longer than a few seconds. Coupled with the shorter playtime of around four hours, I could easily see veteran gamers blasting through Lego Voyagers in a couple of sessions.
However, Lego Voyagers doesn’t seem crafted for that demographic. Instead, it feels ideally suited for first-time players. Unlike It Takes Two and Split Fiction, which I’m sure it’ll be compared to by many, there’s little demand on the player, and with no punishment for death or sections requiring quick reaction times, Voyager can be enjoyed at a very leisurely pace.
While Voyagers certainly didn’t challenge my own gaming chops, I found great satisfaction in watching (and assisting when needed) my partner become more and more comfortable with the basic gameplay mechanics as we progressed. She went from having to directly look down at her controller just to press the correct button to jump, to performing the input with a natural ease like a seasoned pro, which was immensely satisfying from my perspective.
Lego Voyagers may be one of the simplest co-op games I’ve ever played, and without the draw of a blockbuster license like Star Wars or Batman, it might not have the broad appeal of previous Lego games, but if you want to introduce somebody you love to gaming, it’s perfect.
Lego Voyagers is avalaible now on PC, PS4, PS5, Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2 and Xbox Series X/S
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