On the surface, LEGO Builder’s Journey looks like a great pick for a short relaxing imaginative puzzle game. In reality, it’s an expensive nightmare that tortures the player for 2 hours rather than providing any semblance of fun. If you rush, you might make it under the refund window but it’s honestly not even worth a try. It’s certainly not worth the 20 dollar asking price, unless you enjoy getting frustrated at virtual children’s toys.

IDK some journey with a father and son and ♥♥♥♥ gets weird. At some point there’s a robot? It’s an interesting method of storytelling. There is zero dialog. It’s all silent and a story told via LEGO, destruction, creation, and action. Not really worth the frustrating gameplay required to play through it though.

It’s a pretty gorgeous game but it also seems to really be demanding for such a simple game. Toward the end I had some slowdown. Dark sections suck and there needs to be way less of them. Music is nice, I enjoyed it.

One problem is the level design isn’t always great. Since there is no dialog, it’s not always obvious what exactly you are supposed to do. There’s been a few levels I desperately clicked everything in sight and just had no idea what the game wanted me to do because nothing seemed to progress the puzzle. (Some of the later levels are especially atrocious – I watched a walkthrough and laughed when the youtuber also had no idea what to do for a solid 3 minutes)

It’s a very simple puzzle game. You place lego blocks to help the characters cross to the goal. Early on, it’s pretty obvious where to go as its just following the father. The characters will only travel on certain blocks so may need to keep moving the same block around and build stairs or bridges to place it closer and closer to the goal. Later stages change the goals around in various ways. Some are literal puzzles with placing certain blocks on certain areas. Others are more free form where need to build a bridge but its up to you how to do it.

There are two big problems holding back this simple gameplay.

One – the controls are an unintuitive nightmare and you will constantly perform the wrong actions on accident. The left click is used for EVERYTHING. Rotating, picking up, dropping. It’s all left click. Short vs Long press. It’s absolutely infuriating how often I meant to place a block and rotate it instead or vice versa. The worst crime? It could so easily be fixed with letting players customize their own controls. Nope, not possible. Just binding rotate to mouse wheel or right click or something would have made so much more sense.

Secondly – as mentioned in presentation it’s just not clear what you’re supposed to do at times. Mixed with the terrible controls, it becomes a nightmare. I genuinely had trouble figuring out if I understood the puzzle correctly and it was just ♥♥♥♥ controls preventing me from completing it, or what.

It had some bad slow down in later sections where I had to turn off Raytracing and Shadows to get it performing again.

Operating System: Windows 10
Processor (CPU): Intel Core i5-3570K CPU @3.40GHz
Graphics Card (GPU): NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070
Memory (RAM) 16 GB

LEGO has a way of making you feel like a kid again. Well this game certainly made me feel like a kid again, but not in the good way. I felt like a screaming toddler who just wanted to cry and throw a tantrum because I dropped a block instead of placing it where I wanted it for the 50th time in a row due to the atrocious controls.

was pretty fun but buy it on sale, i beat it in under 2 hours.