Indie-dev-turned-publishing powerhouse Thunderful has announced the release date for the next video game based around Denmark’s most beloved export (well, bacon and the lovely Felix on our video team are pretty good, too). Lego Bricktales is launching on Switch — and all the other places you usually find your video games — on 12th October.
First announced back in March and coming from Clockstone Studio, the developer behind the Bridge Constructor series, this game is less about bashing the scenery to collect studs and more about actually building things. And then using those things to solve puzzles across five biomes (including jungles, cities, and Medieval castles) as “you search for inspiration to help your grandfather reinvigorate his rundown amusement park.”
As you can see from the trailer above and the screenshots below, it all looks rather pleasant. However, when the PR blurb starts mentioning how our building skills will be put to the test by “functional physics-based puzzles like building cranes and gyrocopters”, our BK: Nuts and Bolts start a-tingling. That massively underrated Banjo-Kazooie game was — in our estimation — ahead of its time, coming in 2008 just a couple of years before the Minecraft-fuelled sandbox construction craze that would go on to grip the gaming industry.
Now, whether Lego Bricktales offers anything as in-depth as Nuts and Bolts’ comprehensive and hugely satisfying vehicle-building mechanics is up for debate — and we’d guess that’s likely not the focus here anyway. Despite our love for it, we always thought Nuts and Bolts could have benefitted from bolstering its vehicular challenges with some environmental construction puzzles throughout its cavernous levels.
Regardless of exactly how in-depth Bricktales will turn out, it’s definitely nice to see a Lego game with a focus on player creativity, as opposed to light platforming hijinks. There’s room for all sorts, of course, and we’ve had fantastic fun with the Lego series, but as massive fans of the real-life plastic brick, we’re itching for a Lego game that actually lets us build stuff.
Think this could be that game? Think we’ve used this article as a thinly-veiled excuse to wax lyrical about a Microsoft-exclusive Banjo game? Let us know below (and how very dare you).
