I have a confession: I’m not very good at building with LEGO. This is a revelation as much as it is an admission, something I really only figured out while playing ClockStone Studio’s LEGO: Bricktales over the weekend. It’s one thing to place random LEGO in an aesthetically pleasing way; it’s another thing entirely to, as Bricktales bids its players to do, construct architecturally-stable structures out of nothing but some bricks and some basic guidelines—no instructions, vibes only.
The game starts off simple enough. You are a young builder who has been summoned to an abandoned theme park by your wacky inventor grandfather, known simply as Grandpa. Grandpa has built a portal that can take people to other locations, but first, you have to help him restore power to his basement lab after an accident fried all the systems. This is the tutorial stage, and nothing is meant to be that hard here. You make a simple bridge, reconnect some pipes, flip a switch and eventually get back to Grandpa in one piece.