A very short puzzle game with a quaint little story. It's cute! My biggest take away from Builder's Journey is complete and utter amazement at how stunningly rendered these Lego bricks are. Like looking at an actual, physical diorama - the bricks that compose every stage have their own imperfections and reflective qualities that make the game look completely Real, made even better when stages animate with brick-style liquid physics. Maybe the first actual case I've seen where Raytracing doesn't look like complete dog shit.

Amazing: they finally made Lego Digital Designer: The Game. Breathtakingly beautiful if you've got the GPU for it (I had more framerate drops in the last 15 minutes of this than in all 60+ hours of Elden Ring), and the puzzles are mostly great, though some of the late game areas disappointingly fall into "keep clicking stuff until the game decides you've done it enough" design. But you know what? If ever there was a puzzle game that earned the right to let the brainteasing take a backseat for a bit, it's this one. Would love to see a sequel one of these days.

Lego Builder's Journey is a puzzle game where you build things with legos. Yeah. That's the best premise for a puzzle game, and surprising it took this long for something like it to come out. Obviously there have been many lego games but those are more just platformers with a lego theme. When i was kid I was all over legos, they were a big part of my childhood. So as you can imagine i was pretty excited for something like this.

And, its good. Its not a great game. But its good. For something as creative as legos this game feels surpisingly restrictive. Lots of levels only give you a select few pieces and while you can technically complete them in any way you want, there isnt really that many options. Not to say some levels arent pretty clever. And there were quite a few I liked a lot but seemingly just as many with weird mechanics that expect you to think outside of the box despite the majority of the game being very straightforward.

The story is... there I guess. Theres definitely something but its all about the visuals and music. Its a little abstract and I didnt particularly care for it, but Im also terrible at picking up on things so maybe its actually pretty good. Thankfully what the story is made up of, those aformentioned music and visuals are really good. The music is very peaceful and fits the game well. Obviously everything is lego but the little diorama-esque levels are all very pretty looking with some fantastic lighting.

The game happens to be quite short which may make it seem a little expensive for the price tag but its just a little puzzle game, I dont think these types of games need to be long and I prefer wanting more than overstaying its welcome. Quality is over quantity and this game has the quality. There is also a creative mode where you can build sandcastles as your leisure which is neat but also feels as restrictive as the main game. Still holding out for a game thats just minecraft creative mode but with legos.

Trophy Completion - 100% (no platinum)
Time Played - 3 hours 2 minutes (some idle)
Nancymeter - 72/100
Game Completion #90 of 2022
August completion #10

What an absolutely beautiful game that no one is talking about.

I played this on my RTX 2070 with all Ray tracing set to the absolute max and even other effects all the way on the top with DLSS 2.2 set on Performance mode at 1080p. The game ran between 30 and 60 fps. Played with the mouse.

I saw this in a Digital Foundry video looking absolutely amazing and decided to play it. The game is one of the most visually stunning games ever and the RT implementation is master class. You see reflections in reflections with the underside of the Lego blocks visible as well.

The music is sublime and very relaxing. Invokes Journey a lot.

Weirdly enough the thing I wanna focus on is the story and gameplay and how all of it works together.

The story is that you are a kid playing with your father as he teaches you life lessons and you learn more and more and are able to solve complex puzzles, the dad gets busier and busier with his job (a monotonous level with no need for any imagination or creativity which showcases the work life pretty well). One night you and your dad are making a castle and he is unable to finish it with you as he has to go work and you make a robot dog like thing that can make it's own pieces which adds it's own challenge to gameplay. It really communicates the satisfaction of playing with Legos in that sense.

Anyway you go to find your dad and there's a lot of levels with a split view with son and dad working together without knowing. Your father then tries to rescue you and in the end, in a rather touching moment, your dog creation sacrifices itself for you and your dad to meet. (This last part might have been added later as a lot of other reviews and gameplay don't mention or show this).

I found this super touching and the music the atmosphere and everything was great. I got the game for the DLSS 2.2 DLL file but ended up playing all the way through. Truly amazing.

Also a game being short is not a critique of the game. So thanks Apple arcade for this game I guess and not making it exclusive.

"Thank god that was over" is never something great to feel from a short experience. LEGO Builder's Journey is a game with a wonderful first hour but then rapidly overstays its welcome.

Firstly, the game is gorgeous. Even on iOS this is a very pretty experience. It feels warm and cosy, like memories of playing with LEGO bricks. It is also realistic enough to give you the feeling that you could just reach into the screen and pick up the bricks for real.

The story is told in a way that is reminiscent of something like Thomas Was Alone, with our characters portrayed by a short stack of bricks (a child) and a taller stack of bricks (a parent). The story is very wholesome, and the ending is a tearjerker, though sadly I had to refer to YouTube to see the ending as I couldn't power through to the finish any longer due to certain elements of this game wearing thin.

The controls are frustrating to say the least. Over on iOS I initially gave the touch controls a go, and after about 15 minutes I quickly connected a controller because it was awful. Using a controller was a slight improvement, but still felt clunky. The button to place down a brick is the same you use to rotate a brick or pick up a brick, often leading to easy mistakes. If you accidentally pick up the wrong brick, cancelling out doesn't put it back, rather it just drops it - this is incredibly infuriating. The sense of depth of these LEGO dioramas also makes manipulating and placing the pieces in a 3D space quite tricky.

Despite spending the whole game fighting with the controls, I was quite enjoying the variety of (fairly easy) puzzles. That is, until roughly the 90-minute mark when the game runs out of ideas and starts repeating itself over and over and over. I really pushed through, knowing this game was short, and every single time I thought I'd reached the end it threw another puzzle at me that I'd completed a dozen times already. It felt like they were playing for time and trying to stretch out the experience rather than adding worth to my time in the game.

The puzzles were eventually repetitive, but perhaps a further issue was how easy they were. Most of the challenge in this game came from fighting the controls and ensuring a brick went in the right place, rather than figuring out what to do.

The price could also be a contentious issue. I played this on Apple Arcade, but was shocked to see this game sells for £16 on Steam. Personally, I think this sort of game is a perfect fit for a Netflix-like service like Apple Arcade, and is in no way worth £16.

Buy this on a deep sale, I do think it's worth a play. It's pretty, and very wholesome, and it gave me a warm feeling inside. I can forgive the lack of difficulty, I just wish they stuck the landing and tightened up the controls.

Builder’s Journey is a surprisingly heartfelt, atmospheric, but ultimately overly simplistic puzzle game/bridge builder. The tone set by the music, imaginative uses of the aesthetic, and the emotive little Lego parent and child are the driving force of the experience. Unfortunately, divorced from these trappings, the gameplay is not particularly engaging or fun. Rarely do the puzzles require much thought to complete and the building aspect of the game is severely limited to placing a handful of blocks on top of each other to make a simple bridge. When progress is slowed, it is often only because it was unclear what could be interacted with as a solution.

Perhaps this assessment is a bit harsh if the target demo of Builder’s Journey was simply children. But as an experience for all ages, which the game seems to shoot for, it is ultimately unsuccessful.

When I first saw Builder’s Journey the first thing that popped into my mind was Monument Valley. It looks similar with a bright and colorful art style, no voice acting, and a story told through actions. It features small spinnable tower-like levels that only take a couple of minutes to solve. The game is imaginative and a nice departure from the typical movie license LEGO games we get from Traveler’s Tales. It’s relaxing, fun, and feels like you’re using Legos to get around these levels to reach your destination.


You play as a boy and his father who essentially are trying to take down some evil company the dad works for. The game is so short that there isn’t time for a feel-good story or emotions to set in, but the game at least tries. You pick up lego pieces and set them down on the round pegs like you would in real life. You hold the pick-up button to let go and that’s about it. You can spin the level a little bit, but the great thing about this game is there’s no preset design you need to follow. You get a few pieces and the puzzle is to figure out how to put them together with the limited pegs in the level to get your characters across. Each character has two orange platform pieces that you use for them to hop around on. Sometimes you need to build something, but the game gets tough towards the end.

Puzzles towards the end involve two screens in which you need to either place blocks a certain way or get blocks to the other screen in a certain way. Each area has maybe five puzzles before the next idea is brought in. One idea is using race track-type pieces with curves and straights to get across on a roller skate. Another idea is using blocks to grow more are you put them down. It’s all very imaginative and never gets boring or old. The game has a “just one more puzzle” feel to it. You get breaks in between with a scripted puzzle that just requires putting a few pieces together, but it’s a nice break. I did have issues placing and dropping blocks as the camera would be at a weird angle. The blocks do snap over the pegs they need to go in, but sometimes I just couldn’t get it positioned right and required fiddly placement.


There were a few occasions in which where to go in the level wasn’t obvious or my character wouldn’t start hopping across the level because a certain block was too high or too far away and I couldn’t figure out which one. The levels that take this kind of trial and error are frustrating and ruin the pacing, but thankfully there were only a few. I also feel that this game could have been made without the Lego branding. While it feels and looks charming, generic blocks would have worked just as well too. There’s nothing that the Lego branding brings to this game to make it feel unique.


That’s basically it to the entire game. It ends in 90 minutes as it was originally designed for iOS devices with 5-10 minute pick-up-and-play sessions. There is an RTX option for PC, which is super weird for this kind of game, and it looks okay, but why cut your frames in half for a game like this? There are only a few levels that use light that uses RTX, so it feels kind of pointless. Other than that the game looks great and the physics are also good as well. I highly recommend this game if you want a zen-like relaxing puzzle game to kill a couple of hours. It’s not memorable, but it sure is fun.