“What does it feel like to be a one-by-one brick?” It’s the existential question that some said videogames couldn’t answer, but that hasn't stopped the team behind LEGO Voyagers from trying.

Four years ago, the Danish indie studio Light Brick released LEGO Builder’s Journey, a warmly-received dioramic puzzle game that aimed to capture LEGO at its simplest and most playful. “It was about building with bricks, that was the main mechanic,” says Creative Director Karsten Lund. “This time it’s about being a brick. How would you navigate in the world? What can a brick actually do? That was the initial prototype.”

As it transpires, being the smallest kind of LEGO brick is a bit like being a snowball rolling down a powdery hill. Rolling and jumping around each level, you glom onto other LEGO pieces scattered around the environment, turning yourself into larger and potentially more useful shapes. You might become a long stick, for instance, travelling end-over-end to vault small chasms and scale cliffs. Or, with the help of a hinge piece, you might become the weight at the end of a pendulum, building enough momentum to fling a friend across a broken bridge.

Ah, yes: LEGO Voyagers is plural for a reason. “We saw a lot of people playing LEGO Builder’s Journey together, even though it was a singleplayer game,” Lund says. “We thought, ‘Let’s have LEGO Voyagers actively playable by two players, because that’s much more fun.’ Then you can connect to each other, and you could become a long structure of bricks and tumble around like that.”

Each player’s brick is a little personality, looking out on the world through a single orb. “We added the eye for character,” Lund says. “We actually already knew that there is a brick with an eye on it, in the assortment that is used for creatures and stuff.” 

LEGO Builder’s Journey was about the relationship between parent and child, and whether the two spend enough time playing together. Once LEGO Voyagers became a co-op game, it was evident that its story should concern friendship.

“We added this whole idea of LEGO bricks wanting to become astronauts, which we think is very common,” Lund says. “A lot of LEGO bricks want to become astronauts, I’m sure about that.”

The journey to rescue an abandoned spaceship is winningly childlike, but as Lund describes LEGO Voyagers’ themes, it’s clear there’s a very adult conception of friendship in the mix too. “We ask open questions, like we did in LEGO Builder’s Journey,” he says. “How do you stay connected? How do you share a dream, when maybe you can grow apart a little bit? I think a lot of people will hopefully respond to the ideas we have in the game, and maybe have a conversation afterwards about these things.” 

Light Brick tells its stories without words—through music, the environment, and gameplay scenarios designed to take you through certain emotions. “It takes a lot of testing,” Lund says. “And a lot of figuring out what the audience actually understands from what they’re experiencing.” As a result, though, the studio believes it’s created a story that presents questions without telling you how to feel. 

Similarly, the act of solving LEGO Voyagers’ puzzles is not prescriptive. Physics is your friend, and can be manipulated just as playfully as the bricks lying about the place. “We have a scene in the trailer where you build your own catapult,” Lund says. “You can start by trying and seeing that it doesn’t get you very far. So you have to figure out, 'How do I actually go further?' But you can also do other things to get across. And I think we would love to see as many different solutions as possible.”

It’s something that Lund hopes captures the real-life experience of playing with LEGO, in a more dynamic fashion than LEGO Builder’s Journey did. “There are still puzzles in there, because we still believe the puzzles are part of the LEGO idea,” he says. “Trying to figure things out for yourself, trying to configure things in your own way. It’s very much part of what makes the LEGO idea fun.”

There’s an established conception of what a LEGO game is, rooted in the success of the licensed movie spoofs pioneered by Traveller's Tales. “There are a lot of awesome LEGO games, and I think they represent a lot of different types of play,” Lund says. “There’s the role-playing with your favourite character, and that’s a very important way to play as well.” 

But Light Brick is trying to do something different here. “We’re trying to say, ‘What happens if we tell our own story?’ Because we want players to be absolutely open to interpreting this universe. That needs to be new. It needs to be something that has not been told before.”

LEGO Voyagers is available now on the Epic Games Store.