Earlier this week, I had the chance to go hands-on with LEGO Horizon Adventures. Alongside all my other praise for this game, I really loved the immense level of detail put into making each and every LEGO brick component. That’s not a coincidence, either, as it turns out the entire world is made out of individual bricks in a way that could apparently be reconstructed in real life from actual physical LEGO sets.
Speaking to me at Summer Game Fest Play Days over the weekend, Guerrilla Games narrative director James Windeler told me about how this strange collaboration between Guerrilla and LEGO came about. Guerrilla had originally prototyped Horizon: Zero Dawn’s robot dinosaurs in DUPLO and had a lot of interest in model building. The team wanted to make something more lighthearted for its next project. And then there was that LEGO Tallneck collaboration from a few years back. On the LEGO side, LEGO really liked that the Horizon games had bright colors and optimistic themes, as well as a relatively inclusive fanbase. Put it all together, and it’s no wonder the two companies came to an understanding.
Most LEGO games up to now have been made by what is now called TT Games, but TT isn’t involved with this one. Instead, co-development group Studio Gobo and LEGO are working with Guerrilla Games, which itself has assembled a team including a number of individuals who worked on the original Zero Dawn. Windeler tells me many of them have had kids since Zero Dawn released, and those kids are now reaching an age where their parents want to play video games with them. Hence, Horizon Adventures’ co-op feature.
But a different team also means different approaches and capabilities, and for Guerrilla in particular that meant really sweating the LEGO details. Windeler says the team wanted Horizon Adventures to feel like a “playable LEGO movie,” and notes that every single asset in the game is “built from an individual [LEGO] brick.”
“It’s designed by master builders,” he says. “All of these things, from the coolest elements of Horizon, the majestic nature, the machines, the characters, they’re all following the rules of physical LEGO. So even though they’re made as digital assets, you could build them technically out of physical sets…And it also extends to the animation style and the way that the characters move in the game. There’s this kind of stop-motion of all of the characters. Yeah, it’s like a toy. ‘Toyetic’ was a word that was thrown around a lot as a target, and it’s the idea that you’re playing potentially with your own figurines.”
What Windeler is describing certainly showed in my hands-on time with the game. I pointed out that when characters fall off a high ledge, they humorously plop down flat like a LEGO shoved off a shelf. Then they quickly pop back up and trot off again with the jerky motions of a child walking a LEGO character around on a play mat. There are other little nods like that to the overall feel of playing with LEGOs – for instance, when I rescued some Nora villagers in my demo, there were a few generic LEGO people mixed in with the Horizon-themed costumes. What was that about?
“When you’re a kid, when you’re playing LEGO, with LEGO, you’re not necessarily building this completely unified world,” Windeler explains. “You’re using the LEGO that you have from your set.” Fair enough.
Windeler can’t comment on whether or not the very real buildability of LEGO Horizon Adventures means more LEGO Horizon sets are on the way, nor can he speak for whether or not other PlayStation IP will get LEGO games. He does tell me that LEGO Horizon Adventures’ story is about seven to eight hours long, and will have a replayable element at the end that will allow players to revisit regions they’d previously visited and unlock more customizations and other things. As Windeler told me, Horizon Adventures isn’t supposed to be a 20+ hour adventure the way Horizon: Zero Dawn was. It’s loosely based on Zero Dawn, but it’s meant to be digestible for everyone – not just ten hours of in-jokes for existing fans of Horizon.
“There’s tons of nods, and I mentioned iconic scenes that we’ve reinterpreted that will be recognizable and hopefully joyful to a fan of the series, but at the same time, we want people to come in who have no Horizon knowledge.”
For more details on LEGO Horizon Adventures, you can check out our full hands-on preview. We also played the new Astro Bot game at the same PlayStation appointment, and have a preview for that as well.
