Horizon zero dawn And Horizon Forbidden West are not exactly child-friendly. Both games were rated T for Teen, and I often think of them as high-minded stories of found family, billionaire greed, and environmental collapse. So reinterpreting those stories through tacky slapstick feels somehow unfair.
When Lego Horizon Adventures was announced, I immediately thought: Who asked for this?! Who is this actually for?!
But then I remembered they’re also games about stabbing giant robot dinosaurs with sticks.
I don’t have children. However, I do have a trio of young nieces and nephews that I adore and enjoy sharing video games with. We hop on FaceTime and I point the camera at the TV like I’m their own personal Twitch streamer. But I didn’t get to share either Horizon game with them. The games were a combination of too scary or too violent, too boring or too complicated – all things that made me love them. Of Lego Horizon AdventuresBut I can share a story I love in a way that resonates with them.
Stories are important. To share stories are important. And sometimes those big, impactful, perspective-changing stories can start with a single small plastic pebble. Sometimes a level of fantastical abstraction is easier to face than a hard lesson about the world – for example, how a giant robot that eats trees is an easier concept to grasp than the all-consuming greed of late-stage capitalism. (And besides, a robot is much better than the concept of an economic system.)
If you’ve played any of the Lego games, you’ve played Lego Horizon Adventures. You know how it works. There’s the ironic reinterpretation of the story, the brick-based reinterpretation of the world, the dad jokes. You run through bite-sized mini-levels and do some simple platforming, collecting studs and battling enemies as you play as Aloy or one of her allies – which you unlock as you play through the levels.
In between levels, there’s a hub city — Mother’s Heart — where you can customize the buildings and decorations with unlockable Lego sets. As you progress through the story, you’ll unlock kits from Lego City and Ninjago. At first it was shocking how out of place the Lego City prison and construction site were in the world of Horizon. But eventually the Lego folly won out and it was no longer weird to walk past a Nora statue right next to a port-a-potty.
Lego Horizon Adventures‘ twist comes from using Horizon’s weaknesses on the machines. Lego Aloy has a Focus that allows her to emphasize them, just like human Aloy does. They can be attacked directly for extra damage, making for a satisfying upgrade from the frankly overly simple combat of Lego games. And the elemental damage from the Horizon games also makes an appearance, with fire, freeze and shock damage changing the way combat plays out.
You fight against human (minifigure) cultists and machines from the bestiary of the Horizon games that have been recreated with Lego blocks. One of the coolest things about the Lego movies is how everything is made from Lego pieces and how they give everything the illusion of being buildable with real, tangible bricks. The world of Lego Horizon Adventures got the same full Lego treatment – from the scenery to the buildings to the tree-eating robots – and it’s beautiful. It’s compelling. It makes the world and its story feel less like Lego people stuck in an unrelated world as a cynical cash grab, and more like it’s telling (mostly) the same story through a different medium.
I love the Horizon games. And I enjoy the Lego style of games with their humor, slapstick, and family-friendly violence. In fact, I’m a fan of the plastic bricks in the real world, and have been for decades more than I care to admit.
Playing (with) Lego does not have to be pure escapism. By telling Horizon’s story of environmental collapse and capitalism gone awry, Lego Horizon Adventures places a layer of child-friendly plastic building block abstraction between the concepts and the increasingly inevitable reality. And that makes it not only manageable, but also shareable.