Lego Horizon Adventures Raises The Question Of What IPs Work As A Lego Game
Having now played about an hour of Lego Horizon Adventures, it feels like a game with great ideas that are restricted by the IP it’s based on. I love the world of Horizon Zero Dawn and Horizon Forbidden West, but the opening hour of Lego Horizon often feels like its setting and characters are clashing with the comedic creativity and gameplay loop that so many Lego games excel at. The opening hour of Lego Horizon feels like a pretty decent start to what’s hopefully a good game–at the very least, it’s shaping up to be my favorite Lego game in terms of visuals–but there are moments where I could see the kid-friendly vibe of the Lego games conflicting with the more adult-oriented storylines of Horizon.
Lego Horizon is a loose retelling of Aloy’s first adventure, in which the bow-wielding protagonist utilizes an assortment of hunting tools and high-tech gadgetry to fight mechanical dinosaurs, mammals, and birds in a world that feels both like a forgotten past and unforeseen future of our own. Aloy, mysteriously birthed from a mountain and subsequently made an outcast, desires to prove herself capable of joining the tribe that cast her out and returning to the mountain to uncover the truth about her origins.
“From the beginning when we started the conversations with [Guerrilla Games], they were very clear,” Studio Gobo animation director Luismi Herrera told me. “They wanted to bring the Horizon series to a broader audience, and they thought that the best way was to retell the story of the original game, the Horizon Zero Dawn game. But obviously we started to go as a fairy tale, a light-hearted version of it, because obviously there are a bit more mature things for that game. It was like, ‘Okay, how can we retell this story, keeping all the core values and everything, with this Lego universe?’ And that’s been the goal. That being said, the core story is the same, it’s [just a retelling] in a light-hearted way.”