Lego Horizon Adventures lets Aloy find her sense of humour, with the help of some exploding hot dogs

I’ve always found the Lego games rather endearing, with their slapstick humour, often eclectic array of blocky setpieces and those wonderfully destructible environments. I challenge you to find me someone who doesn’t delight in destroying a once perfectly arranged pile of bricks in the guise of a cannon, tree or anything else really, just for the sheer joy of watching those objects burst into a wave of collectable studs. I bet you can’t.

Question is, can Lego’s comical playfulness still come through when it’s building on more serious and ‘grown-up’ source material like Horizon Zero Dawn? After all, the Horizon series was intended for more mature audiences from the off – its PEGI 16 age rating a far cry from the U and PG scenes of Star Wars and Indiana Jones, for example, that the Lego games made their name on. There are also themes such as exclusion and isolation tucked into Horizon as well, and let’s not forget the small plot point that is the downfall of humanity. Yes, it is fair to say Horizon Zero Dawn is not exactly the video game equivalent of a cosy bedtime story you read to your children while snuggled up under a blanket drinking cocoa.

But despite seemingly being at odds with each other in many ways, developers Guerrilla Games and Studio Gobo have managed to marry the two together rather well, as I discovered during an hour long hands-on preview of Lego Horizon Adventures last week.

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The upcoming, PlayStation-published release will mark quite a change for the Horizon series. Not only is Lego Horizon Adventures arriving with an easy breezy, friendly-to-all approach compared to its more cinematic counterpart, it’s also freeing Aloy from her PlayStation-first shackles. On Lego Horizon Adventures’ release this November, she will make her debut on the family favourite Nintendo Switch, as well as PC and PS5, simultaneously.