LEGO Voyagers review: prepare to fall in love with two bricks

Just 15 minutes into LEGO Voyagers, as we rolled our little LEGO blocks through one of the game’s gorgeous little tableaus, snapping into studs and steering into flower fields that pop in a satisfying way when touched, my partner (in the game and in life) Lisa sighed and said: ‘I hope the afterlife is like this.’

I understood what she meant. There’s a serenity to LEGO Voyagers and its co-op exploration, its carefully-constructed world that leans into the core tenants of why LEGO is fundamentally good: its playfulness, its accessibility, its attention to detail.

Player one controls a blue block of LEGO with a single blinking eye on it, and player two controls a similarly-shaped red block. In the opening moments of the game the two blocks witness a failed spaceship launch from their home island, and go on an adventure when some ship remnants float into nearby waters, opening up a pathway to the mainland. It soon becomes clear that the two bricks are going to collect all the pieces of this broken ship and try to reassemble it.

LEGO Voyagers: Light Brick Studio

LEGO Voyagers is the second game from Light Brick Studio, the team behind LEGO Builder’s Journey. While that was a single-player game set across intimate tableaus, Voyagers expands into a more traditional videogame world, one which can only be explored in two-player co-op.

We played couch co-op on a single screen, but the game also supports online play; its three-to-four hour length means that you could feasibly get through the game in an afternoon together.

LEGO Voyagers is a light, but also surprisingly impactful, experience. Puzzles rarely stumped us for longer than a few minutes; more often than not the solution is to gather some bricks and snap them together to form a bridge to the next location, and the challenging part is figuring out how to do that, exactly.

LEGO Voyagers: frustrations

The controls for sticking bricks together can be finicky – you press a button to go into ‘build mode’ and then press it again to snap a brick into place, but picking out a specific brick from a pile or carefully disassembling a structure to rebuild is very difficult.

Thankfully, Voyagers designs around these frustrations somewhat by making sure that no structure requires too many bricks to build, and by never punishing you too badly – if you drop a brick off a ravine it’ll spawn right next to you again, and there are no puzzles that demand you build something quickly.

There’s a good mix of puzzles that the two of you can work through together without needing to coordinate and others that demand communication. There’s friction, but not much frustration.

At several points you’ll find vehicles and contraptions that the two of you can operate together: to steer a boat, for instance, one of you has to handle acceleration and brakes while the other handles turning. In its best moments, LEGO Voyagers can make you feel truly in-sync with your co-op partner, the two of you operating a machine or vehicle together seamlessly.

Coming across a new mechanic or idea is always a pleasure, especially since – as with all LEGO games – every item has been assembled as though it was made from real bricks.

LEGO Voyagers: creative mode

In a few instances the game shifts into a more ‘creative’ mode, letting you use bricks to decorate and design parts of the ship you’re building, and we routinely spent longer on these sections than we did on most of the puzzles – not because we were trying to make something that looked good, but because snapping bricks together to form an unholy LEGO abomination is one of the primary childhood joys you don’t get many chances to experience as an adult.

Watch the LEGO Voyagers trailer.

The two bricks you’re controlling are adorable, and seem genuinely bonded throughout the experience. There’s a dedicated ‘noise’ button on the controller that allows the blocks to crudely communicate (it sounds like they’re singing to each other), and If you approach your partner and press the ‘snap into stud’ button, you can stick the two characters together and roll around as one.

LEGO Voyagers: emotional investment

This is more than just a cute detail: LEGO Voyagers spends its run-time building up your emotional investment in these blocks and their relationship. The simple narrative underpinning the experience sneaks up on you: I did not expect to get so invested in these little cyclops bricks, but even writing this review the day after finishing the game I find myself kind of missing them.

LEGO Voyagers is a great, small, relatively straightforward co-op experience. It’s something you could play with someone who has never finished a game before or your gamer buddy who finished Elden Ring five times, and both of them would likely enjoy the experience equally.

It captures that feeling in LEGO that’s so satisfying, when things snap together in a way that reveals the real nature of the bigger object you’ve been working towards, and extrapolates it across the whole experience.

LEGO Voyagers is a game about building not just a spaceship, but also a relationship.

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