Commonplace

LEGO Builder's Journey

Picked up free in December 2022, played through in one evening snowed in at our hotel. Very cute, obvious win being that it's so much more tactile than any other LEGO game and simplifies the interactions dramatically. Actual gameplay was less compelling, most of the “puzzles” barely qualify as such and the ones that do are sort of stepping outside of the core “build something with LEGO” idea… but maybe that's fine because building something with LEGO is what we're here to do, not solving puzzles.

I do think there's some clever indirect control going on here with UI and color choices, because you've got a whole world built of the same bricks and very few of them are interactable, which could be confusing. Yet I rarely felt frustrated that I couldn't pick something up. There's a combination of color-coding (in many levels all the yellow bricks are for you) and animation (the loose bricks are interactable) and smart cursor hints, but it breaks all of those rules at one time or another and might be worth another pass to inspect how they nudge the player in each level.