Lego Horizon Adventures is a kid-friendly Lego twist on the Horizon games, out now for PS5, Switch, and PC. See our review for more.
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.
