LEGO: Builder’s Journey does something special with its bricklaying

Setup: iPhone XS Max (iOS 13), iPad Pro (iPad OS)

Developer: Light Brick Studios

Publisher: LEGO, Apple

Release Date: 12/21/2019

Platforms: Apple Arcade

I have a distinct memory of playing with elaborate LEGO sets as a kid. My parents – god rest their feet – bought my brother and me one of those giant “do what you want” bins of LEGO bricks when we were really little and told us to go buck wild with them. Looking back, I’m honestly surprised we didn’t a) choke on them or b) straight-up learn engineering and architecture as a result of playing with them.

That said, it’s been about a decade or two since I have really sat down and played with a LEGO set. They’re expensive these days, with “adult” Architecture sets running $50 or more a pop for 500+ pieces that build a teensy diorama of a city skyline. You can certainly go big–the Liebherr R 9800 Excavator Technic set runs nearly $500 for over 4100 pieces. (That’s still not even as expensive as you can get. Naturally, the top dog is a Star Wars set: The Millennium Falcon set costs $800, the price of a new mid-range smartphone, and comes with over 7500 pieces.)

LEGO today has a distinct place in pop culture. For years, they’ve cornered the market on franchise games, with creative takes on popular media like Harry Potter, Batman and Star Wars. In just the last few years, we’ve seen several original LEGO movies hit theaters to massive critical and popular success. It’s hard to imagine a world without LEGO.

And yet, here I am, blindsided by LEGO: Builder’s Journey, an Apple Arcade exclusive by internal LEGO game dev team Light Brick Studios. Coming in well under an hour to play, it has sneakily become one of my favorite games of 2019.

What do you do in Builder’s Journey? Well, you build. The object is to get your little LEGO kid from one end of the diorama to the other, in a fashion not too far off from games like Monument Valley. But there’s so much thought put into the level design, into the actual placement of bricks and the feeling of building, that this is more than enough to carry the game.

But that isn’t what surprised me about the game. Nor was it the animation quality, which is frankly stunning for a game made of digitized LEGO (though honestly I shouldn’t be surprised by that aspect, because it’s the same animation style as The LEGO Movie). What really surprised me was the narrative Builder’s Journey decided to tell.

You start the game by placing a single tan-colored brick on a single stud. Another, larger brick appears, which you have to rotate into position. This turns into a full-blown sand castle, which promptly gets washed away by the ocean. Suddenly you’re in this world. Just, fully immersed. Immediately we’re introduced to our story’s protagonists, a child and their parent. They’re enjoying a day at the beach. Then they’re hiking back home through some difficult terrain, which seems like it’s supposed to be a lesson for the kid to learn how to build their way to a solution to any problem. And so in turn, you’re learning how to build to a solution. It’s one of the most natural feelings of progression and improvement I’ve experienced in a game, maybe ever.

After your day at the beach with your parent, the two of you begin to build a version of the castle you made. But off in the distance, a buzzer sounds harshly, and a platform appears to take your parent away. Dejected, they’re led to a factory where they have to finish a platform. For every platform they finish, a single gold star is dropped into a trashcan. After two or three finished platforms, your parent tries to head home to help you finish the castle, but they’re constantly interrupted with the order to return to work. Bored and sad, you go inside to a basement, where you build a friend who gives you a skateboard and busts out the wall of your home, Kool-Aid Man style. Thus begins Builder’s journey proper. As to where it ends, I don’t want to spoil too much, but you do absolutely destroy capitalism and reappropriate the means of production from the shitty factory that keeps making your parent work for dubious value.

I really can’t recommend this game enough. There are so many things I love about it – for example, the decision to use regular bricks to make people instead of the classic LEGO Mini-Figs. It is, however, an Apple Arcade exclusive, which leads me to one of my struggles with the game. There are so many clear critiques in this game, not just of capitalism but also of incentive structures in games, how they’re used not only to exploit people but acclimate them to the same mindset that makes your parent’s factory work “acceptable”, and yet… it’s part of the walled garden Apple built to keep certain games away from the other mobile “Riff-raff.”

Would this experience exist if not for Apple? I don’t know. If the game comes out on other platforms, like Steam or Itch.io, I’d say play it then. But if you already have Apple Arcade, I would tell you to run, not walk, to download this game.

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