LEGO: BRICKTALES
A satisfying, imperfect new step forward for Lego games.
It’s one thing to place random Lego bricks in an aesthetically pleasing way; it’s another thing entirely to, as Bricktales bids its players to do, construct architecturally-stable structures out of nothing but bricks and basic guidelines.
You’re tasked with collecting five ‘happiness crystals’ to renovate an abandoned park before the nearby mayor comes to evict him. You can find these crystals in each of the five stages you travel to in the course of the campaign, and the general flow is the same throughout: arrive in a new place, figure out what’s making people in the area unhappy, solve that problem by building things out of Lego, collect the happiness crystal, return and build some theme park rides. Lather, rinse, and repeat. The nice part about going through each stage is that you notice little hidden items that you can’t get yet unless you unlock a special power.
ClockStone Studio, Bricktales’ developer, is best-known for its Bridge Constructor series, and it brings the general vibe of that prior series into their work here. When you enter a new
puzzle, you are given all of your available parts, an area to build them in with upper and lower bounds, and a few instructions, like “build the bridge so that 1) nothing breaks and 2) the test robots can cross it”. You’re then free to build whatever you feel like that meets those conditions.
Sometimes you have to subject your build to a pretty brutal physics battery, like watching a perch for some parrots swing wildly around in an attempt to keep balanced, or a one-ton weight drop directly on the one place you forgot to fortify. Other times, the only instruction “build a perfect pyramid” has you pulling your hair out as you try and fail repeatedly to do what it says, with no hint system to help you. But I think all of its elements come together to help Lego: Bricktales stand triumphantly on its own two janky, shaky legs.
"Figure out what’s making people in the area unhappy, solve that problem by building things out of Lego"
Manages to build a lot of fun despite some structural shakiness and tricky puzzles. Kaile Hultner
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