When I think of Lego today – the toy itself, as well as its many video game versions – it’s easy to get distracted by the decades of licensed properties now immortalised in plastic bricks. I think of building my Lego NES console, or the looming Lord of the Rings Tower of Orthanc which sits next to my telly. In Lego video games, I think of the time I spent roaming round Hogwarts or the Batcave, or the enormous Star Wars galaxy in the recent Skywalker Saga. It’s only after more thought I remember the older models I began with, as a child in the rather distant past.
That’s not to say those early sets were forgettable! I still have the bricks from those castles I cobbled together, or from the rockets I launched from secret bases built under the coffee table. But when I think of those times, I think less of the discrete sets you could buy (or wait for each birthday) and more of the whole mess of Lego I was slowly accumulating – constructing and then deconstructing each model into one huge heap that lived in a big storage box. Dipping into it, pulling bits out, seeing what I could make of it – that was playing with it beyond just building with it. And while Lego Bricktales is somewhat limited in this level of creation, and especially so at first, it eventually offers the most Lego-like experience in video games since the fully sandbox Lego Worlds.
Via a rather vague story of your avatar and their grandpa, you’ll slowly unlock a miniature hub world featuring portals to various classic Lego settings: pirate beaches, medieval castles, and of course City. Each area features its own network of Lego dioramas to explore, light puzzles to solve, and a range of mini Lego builds to put together. I loved seeing these themes brought to life using nothing but virtual Lego bricks – something the licensed TT Games titles often strayed away from in their environments – and in cutaway chunks which reminded me of various other isometric puzzlers, or the earliest real Minecraft Lego. I also enjoyed the way my hero minifigure wobbles around these worlds, head sometimes spinning in excitement like a character from the Lego Movie. But it’s that last point – the mini builds themselves – where Lego Bricktales really stands on its own.
