What Makes Lego Video Games Appealing?

There’s a lot of Lego video games available for different consoles. As a casual player myself, I wonder if there’s an audience for these games, as they keep getting new releases. From Lego Star Wars to Lego Knight’s Kingdom, the appeal in these games is the nostalgia and letting two people play at the same time, as Ryan Fan explains:

You’re constantly making progress and helping each other figure out where to go, what blocks to hit, which characters to talk to, and which items you need. You’re sharing triumphs as well as struggles with someone else, and I don’t know if I would like the games as much without playing with my brother or my girlfriend.

To be fair, the appeal of Lego video games is not their story. The plot follows pretty closely after a movie franchise like Star Wars, The Incredibles, or Lord of the Rings, but people in these games rarely talk. They may tell you about an item they need, but the story is often more lightly comical than it is profound in a Lego video game.

For adults too, the Lego video games are funny. According to Keri Honea at The Playstation Lifestyle, the miming, drawings, and gestures of the Lego games often parody the seriousness of the movies. In Lego Lord of the Rings, one of the main characters is killed with a banana and a broom in his chest. Serious events that the survival of the entire world is contingent on, such as Gollum and Frodo fighting over the ring, are treated with meme-like dancing and faux-outrage.

The director for Lego The Incredibles, Peter Gomer, calls the process similar to building a giant Lego set, where developers have components, ideas, and mechanics, and then proceed to modify them, mix them together, and use their imagination to make whatever they want.

After you get through the story of each Lego game, it’s an open world. You’re on a quest to 100% completion of the game, even if there’s no one set, linear path to get it. And then there’s the element of fantasy, imagining that we are all also ourselves building our real buildings or climbing our own elaborate towers ourselves.