Whilst attending Gamescom 2025 last week, I was lucky enough to enjoy a 15 minute long play through demo of Lego Voyagers, a pseudo-sequel to the successful Lego Builders Journey released in 2021.This time around though, you’ll need to find a friend to come along for the journey with you, as Lego Voyagers is a 2-player co-operative game which can either be played locally or online.
Let’s put the pieces together as we jump into the XboxEra preview of Lego Voyagers.
Bricking it
Lego Voyagers begins when two seemingly innocuous and tiny single Lego blocks discover an abandoned spaceship on an adorable looking, diorama style planet full of trees, flowers and butterflies all made entirely from Lego bricks. You and your partner will play as either a red brick or a blue one, and there is some incredibly charming scenery to jump around on and explore, and unsurprisingly, it’s all super cute and smooth to play with enough bright colours to keep even the most distracted of players engaged.
The controls are simple to pick up (there were definitely some younger children nearby doing a much better job of this than me) and it is easy to navigate and manipulate your way around your environment. You can bounce, jump and tumble your way around (sometimes unpredictably due to the bumpy terrain), attaching yourself to blocks and then picking them up and carrying them either alone or with your teammate. You can also rotate them and then release them where you need them to be to build simple structures to assist your progress.
Teamwork Makes The Dream Work
You and your teammate will need to work collaboratively, solving physics based puzzles to help you reach areas of the environment you can’t jump or climb to – sometimes you can each be at one end of a lever or catapult, enabling your friend to access higher ground, and then moments later you could be you sliding together down poles, or spinning round in circles to create momentum and movement. Some slightly trickier movements during the game involve jumping from brick to brick over water which some younger children may find hard to start with, but they are definitely a great way to learn how to use a controller correctly… (I definitely didn’t make the developer and my teammate turn round and face the other way whilst I was struggling with this!) One thing I did notice was that there was often more than just one solution to each puzzle, which definitely encouraged us to think more creatively as a team and bounce ideas off of each other to problem solve.
During this preview, myself and my teammate built bridges, platforms and ledges and we also discovered what looked to be a crashed spaceship – but there was no dialogue or text to help us, we just used our imaginations to imagine what was happening in the story. We also discovered that you really had to work together seamlessly; if you are joined together, you literally cannot move unless you are both using your controllers in the same way.
A Beautiful Playground
Although there are objectives and puzzles to solve during the game, the developers of Lego Voyagers really encourage free rein to explore the environment and to build what you need with wanton abandon. Chatting to the developer, it was clear that building such playful physics into the game was one of the key objectives, and they shared that there was a lot of experimentation and fun had in finalising the game. Overall, this freedom was one of my favourite parts of the demo, and of games like this in general: I was happy just bouncing around and surveying the area, to see how many bricks I could stick to myself and my partner and what I could build. The puzzles I experienced whilst playing were simple enough for children to solve independently, but not too easy as to make them boring for us grown-up Lego fans; and the teamwork and cooperation needed to achieve goals really brings to life what Lego is all about: creating and building with friends.
Playing through this game was a real delight for me this week, I’m fairly new to video games, but I have been a Lego fan for a long while; and despite the absolute chaos of Gamescom surrounding me in the booth – I still managed to get that feeling of calm satisfaction that I remember from playing with Lego as a child. We had a lot of proper ‘laugh out loud’ moments as well as a couple of frustrating ones, and I am really excited about getting stuck in with the full game of Lego Voyagers soon. Even better, the game ships with a ‘Friend’s Pass’ meaning as long as one of you owns the game, you can both play. Sounds pretty great to me!
Lego Voyagers is releasing on Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, PC and PlayStation on September 15th.
