I've been a huge Lego enthusiast all my life, and while I've also enjoyed Lego's now-formulaic action game format, I was pleased to see them branch out into something more experimental. As there is no added licensed material to work with, I expected Builder's Journey to lean into Lego's own identity, particularly regarding creativity. And it does... a little. This is a puzzle game about getting a character from point A to point B. There are varying amounts of creative wiggle room for how you do this, but it's ultimately a puzzle game with a linear solution each time. In the few moments the puzzles are more challenging, the creative options almost disappear entirely. Granted, it's extremely difficult to make puzzles and options gel; I personally had some difficulty getting into Scribblenauts and parts of Tears of the Kingdom for this reason. The narrative is carried out with no dialogue and feels like it wants to have depth, but within the first ten minutes, I understood the message to be "work and monotony bad, child and fun good" and gathered nothing else throughout the rest of it. I ran this on a high-powered machine and fiddled with the very involved (and unclear) graphical settings, but ultimately could not get it to look any nicer than its Switch port (turn off film grain and motion blur at the very least). The environments are well-detailed and use many clever brick choices, but there is surprisingly little variety beyond grassy-craggy areas and dim, mechanical areas.

It's not a bad game, but I didn't get much out of it either. That said, I appreciate the attempt and I don't want Lego to give up on branching out.