LEGO Bricktales is an adventure puzzle game that has you solving building puzzles in order to help people from a variety of places, gather Happiness Crystals, and ultimately help your grandfather restore his rundown theme park to its former glory. So how does it work? Read on for a full review…

You start by entering the empty and rundown theme park and going into the elevator that will take you down to the basement where you meet your grandfather. The tutorial is then about you helping out your grandfather with the machine in the middle of the basement. There are little question mark bubbles that teach you the various game mechanics and how to do things, and then little hammer icons that indicate a building puzzle location.

The building puzzles are clearly the main focus of the game. You can’t run, sprint, or jump in the game which makes for a laidback and relaxing gameplay that is very focused on the building puzzles it includes and exploration of the different worlds. It incorporates a nice story and some pretty funny dialogue at times which make the game quite enjoyable to play. If you want a more fast-paced and action-filled game, this is probably not the game for you.

The building puzzles are a lot like building real LEGO.

You get a limited number of blocks which you have to place one by one. And there is a dedicated area in which you can place them. Otherwise, it is up to you and your imagination to build something that fulfills the objective of that puzzle. In the image above, the objective was to build a staircase in order to reach a higher part of the room. Other times you might have to build bridges, staircases up the side of a mountain, or some supports for a platform. And once you have built and successfully completed the objective, your creation is now a part of the world which you can then see and use yourself as your walk around the world completing tasks or collecting collectibles.

In addition, once you have completed it once, you can unlock the sandbox mode which will let you play around with an unlimited number of blocks, more block variations, different colours, and world specific items too. However, the building area is still limited to the inside of the white dotted lines. Despite that, the sandbox mode allows for an immense amount of creativity, and the temptation to go back and rebuild things as you unlock more sandbox items is real. I even went back to a specific build puzzle to change a single block when I got some new items for the sandbox mode.

I played the game on console, and I didn’t find the camera controls and some of the building controls super intuitive to use as someone who has played many video games. It can be a bit tricky and annoying at some times to try and move the camera in the build mode, but I think a lot of it is due to being unfamiliar with the specific camera controls of this game. It will likely become a bit smoother and easier to use with time and practice. Other than a little finicky controls here and there, there aren’t really any aspects of the game to criticise. 

The building puzzles you complete are and integral part of the story, where you help different people in a selection of different worlds. After fully completing the story in a world and helping its inhabitants, you gain Happiness Crystals and unlock the next world to explore. Although, its important to note that you can leave a world and return to the theme park at any point in time.

After collecting the Happiness Crystals, you then use them to restore the theme park to its former glory, through the help of the machine that Rusty, a little robot friend of you and your grandfather, helped make.

You are then able to build the attractions yourself to some extent, which make for a very personalised experience of the game. And as with any other build puzzles in the game, you can come back and change it whenever you want.

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Personally, I had a lot of fun with this game, and I’m sure I will continue to have a lot of fun with it. I quite enjoy chill and slow-paced games from time to time, and I really enjoy the creativity in this game. The seemingly infinite variations of builds the sandbox mode allows allow for hours of fun and creativity. And the fact that your builds become a part of the actual game world is very fun and satisfying. You can make it blend in as best as you can, to try and hide the part that you had to build, or you can make it hot pink and stand out like a sore thumb. You can also play around with the look of your Lego person as much as you want, personally I made mine look like Bob Ross to start with.

In this game, it’s really up to you and your imagination. Unleash your inner master builder have fun and happy building!

(Note that the video game was kindly provided by the developer free of charge to review. The views presented here are my own though).

In you would like more information about Bricktales, the LEGO Group’s official video games podcast Bits N’ Bricks has released a one-off episode about the game.