The games Horizon Zero Dawn and Horizon Forbidden West aren't exactly suitable for children, unlike Lego Horizon Adventures, which features a story that kids will love and can share with each other.
Stories matter. Sharing stories matters. Sometimes, these big, impactful, and visionary-transformative narratives can start with even a small plastic brick.
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A level of fantasy can be more accessible than a harsh reality — for example, how a giant tree-eating robot can be more easily understood than the consumerist greed of capitalism. Furthermore, a robot is much more vulnerable than the abstract concept of an economic system.
If you've played any of the Lego games, you're probably familiar with Lego Horizon Adventures. Its story offers an ironic reinterpretation of the world, recreating it with bricks and featuring funny lines. The game unfolds in short levels, where players enjoy simple platforming, collect studs, and battle enemies, taking on the role of Aloy or one of her allies—who are unlocked as you progress through the levels.
Between levels, there's a central city — the Heart of the Mother — where buildings and decorations are customized with Lego kits, which are unlocked. As the story progresses, kits from Lego City and Ninjago are unlocked. At first, the presence of the Lego City prison and construction site in the world of Horizon seemed subversive. Eventually, though, the Lego craze took over, making it less strange to walk past a statue of Nora, right next to a chemical toilet.
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The twist in Lego Horizon Adventures comes from exploiting the weaknesses of Horizon's machines. Lego Aloy has a Focus that allows her to detect these weaknesses, just like human Aloy. They can attack directly for extra damage, offering a satisfying upgrade to the simple combat of the Lego games. Additionally, the elemental damage from the Horizon games makes a comeback, with fire, ice, and shock damage significantly affecting how battles play out.
Human (minifig) heretics and machines from the Horizon bestiary are represented with Lego bricks. One of the most impressive elements of the Lego movies is how everything is created from Lego pieces, giving the illusion that it could be built with real, tangible bricks. The world of Lego Horizon Adventures has undergone the same careful treatment — from the landscape to the buildings to the trees devouring robots — and it is simply gorgeous. It is immersive. It creates the sense that the world and the story are not just Lego characters placed in an alien world as a cynical profit strategy, but that they are telling (mostly) the same story through a different medium.
Horizon games are beloved by many. The combination of Lego game style with humor, slapstick, and family-friendly violence makes them extremely enjoyable. Even the plastic bricks in the real world have won people's love, and this preference has lasted for many decades.
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play to be just a form of escapism. In telling Horizon's story of environmental collapse and extreme capitalism, Lego Horizon Adventures offers a kid-friendly abstraction, using plastic bricks to connect concepts to an increasingly inescapable reality.
Source: polygon
