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Before serving as the foundation for funny movies and great Batman games, Lego bricks have always been a powerful toy that allows us to come up with all kinds of adventures. Lego Voyagers, a puzzle game from Light Brick Studio out Sept. 15, offers an introspective co-op experience with no words, where players must connect and collaborate to solve puzzles.
In a video interview with Polygon, creative director Karsten Lund talked to us about making Voyagers and the ideas the studio pursued when designing a co-op experience where players must crack puzzles, but with no exposition or written explanation offered to contextualize actions or problems that need to be solved.
“We believe there’s something going on in the interpretive part of the brain that needs to be kept alive at all times, and that it just enjoys things better if it interprets itself or solves its own problems. The worst thing is when a puzzle is spoiled or somebody tells you how to solve it,” Lund said.
The absence of words means there is no quest log or any sort of indication of the next objective. The decision to create a playground where two players can fool around but eventually find the path taught Lund’s team how to balance their desires with players’ freedom. “We love to see people try different things until they get it. And if you remove every single tutorial or word or exposition, you have a lot of room for that. But then, when you have to get a point across, you need to be very, very clear,” Lund said.
When designing Voyagers, Light Brick Studio sought to silently guide players through the path they must take, while allowing for a personal and unique playful experience. The goal simulates what Lund called “playful learning.” Although the team has built a narrative for Voyagers, the creative director explained that what matters most is that players create their own journey. “We still get different interpretations, but that’s actually perfect, because it’s your experience, not ours. Now, it’s the audience’s turn to take it and make it their own,” Lund said.
To enrich the adventure, while stimulating more than just logical thinking, the team has populated the game with different experiences of play. From little rockets to funny popping plants, there are many toys to engage with inside the game.
“Toy play and game play, they are very different things,” Lund said. “Where game play is a sort of quantifiable outcome play, where we wanna complete stuff, wanna move further, you wanna ‘beat the game’ — which is fun in itself — toy play is for no reason, just for the sake of it. You make your own rules, you experiment, you try. We wanted to try to add more of that in there, because we believe it also represents the Lego idea.”
At the center of everything are the Lego bricks. They built both the base Light Brick Studio’s team worked with and the limitations they worked around to create Lego Voyagers. The artistic labor involved in using Lego to portray an idea is immense. Lund shared that the studio has Lego masters and former Lego employees working on finding the best combination of bricks to achieve their creative vision.
“We are trying to celebrate the brick for its own sake. So everything is obviously brick-built in the game, apart from the water. But we also tried to brick-built the entities in the game, like the animals, for instance. We have crabs that are made out of one single brick with two clips, birds that are made of only a few bricks,” Lund said. “Our ethos is to try to use native bricks, if you will, the simplest brick possible, and combine them in very small models but still retain the visual expression of what it is representing.”
Behind a Lego brick, there are endless possibilities of play that one can dream about. Dreaming is an important topic in the game, being represented by the characters’ interest in the cosmos and desire to become astronauts.
“What space represents in this game is the dream. And I think that a voyage is a big journey,” Lund said. “These two friends, they just dream about becoming astronauts, which a lot of Lego bricks do, actually. But it’s something we can all relate to. Building our own rocket and diving into that dream. Playing in general is about dreaming, and about pretending something for a period of time.”
