Lego Horizon Adventures review: a delightful twist on Horizon Zero Dawn

Horizon Zero Dawn and Horizon Forbidden West aren’t exactly kid-friendly. Both games were rated T for Teen, and I tend to think of them as these high-minded stories about found family, billionaire greed, and environmental collapse. So, reinterpreting those stories through plasticky slapstick feels somehow disingenuous.

When Lego Horizon Adventures was announced, I immediately thought, Who asked for this?! Who is this even for?!

But then I remembered that they’re also games about stabbing gigantic robot dinosaurs with sticks.

I don’t have kids. I do, however, have a trio of young nieces and nephews who I adore and love 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 never got to share either Horizon game with them. The games were some combination of too scary or too violent or too boring or too complicated — all of the things that made me love them. With Lego Horizon Adventures, though, I can share a story I love in a way that will resonate with them.

Stories matter. Sharing stories matters. And sometimes those big, impactful, perspective-shifting stories can start with a single small plastic brick. Sometimes, a level of fantastical abstraction is easier to face than a hard lesson about the world — say, 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 a lot more stabbable 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 tongue-in-cheek reinterpretation of the story, the brick-based reimagining of the world, the dad-joke puns. You run around bite-sized mini levels doing some straightforward platforming, collecting studs, and fighting enemies as you play as Aloy or one of her allies — whom you unlock as you play through the levels.

Between levels, there’s a hub city — Mother’s Heart — where you can customize the buildings and decorations with unlockable Lego kits. As you progress the story, you’ll unlock kits from Lego City and Ninjago. At first, how out of place the Lego City jail and the construction site were in the world of Horizon was jarring. But eventually, the Lego silliness won out and it stopped being weird to walk past a Nora statue right next to a port-a-potty.

Lego Horizon Adventures’ twist comes from its use of Horizon’s weak points on the machines. Lego Aloy has a Focus that lets her highlight them just like human Aloy does. They can be attacked directly for extra damage, which makes for a satisfying upgrade to Lego games’ frankly overly simple combat. And the Horizon games’ elemental damage appears as well, with fire, frost, and shock damage changing how the fights go down.

You fight against human (minifig) cultists and machines from the Horizon games’ bestiary that’ve been recreated with Lego bricks. One of the coolest things about the Lego movies is how everything is made of Lego pieces and how they give everything the illusion of being buildable with real, tangible bricks. The world of Lego Horizon Adventures got that same full Lego treatment — from the landscape to the buildings to the tree-eating robots — and it’s gorgeous. It’s immersive. It makes the world and its story feel less like Lego people jammed into an unrelated world as a cynical cash grab and more like it’s just telling the (mostly) same story through a different medium.

I love the Horizon games. And I enjoy the Lego style of game with their humor, slapstick, and family-friendly violence. I’m even a fan of the plastic bricks in the real world and have been for more decades than I care to admit.

Playing (with) Lego doesn’t have to be pure escapism. In telling Horizon’s story of environmental collapse and capitalism gone wild, Lego Horizon Adventures puts a layer of kid-friendly plastic building block abstraction between the concepts and the increasingly inevitable reality. And that makes it not only manageable, but also shareable.