As a small child, I had a huge crate filled with various Lego pieces. New sets were nice, but once assembled and enjoyed, they were in turn disassembled and their constituent parts were destined to become fuel for the crate. Lego is like a bottomless well of colorful, constructive opportunities from which entire worlds spill out, and a single well-timed discovery brings an entirely new idea to life. Lego has been incorporated into dozens of games over the past two and a half decades, but none has brought the magic of my crate to life as much as "Lego Builder's Journey."

Each of the dioramas that make up LEGO Builder's Journey is shaped by a single goal. On one side of each level is a pile of pieces that point to the child, who must cross the thick world in front of him or her and reunite with their parents on the other side. But there is no predetermined solution to any of the puzzles. Like Lego, you are free to use the few blocks provided in any way you wish; establishing the route from A to B is often an iterative process, but there are no failures or incorrect solutions. Your solution need not be elegant or efficient, as long as you can do what you want. Once the pieces are put together, there will be some progress.

When these pieces are combined, they are handled almost as satisfactorily as the real thing. With simple manipulations, the blocks can be fitted into place. The brick pile rattles as you rummage through it to find the perfect fit, then rotate and move seamlessly between the various positions. Given the level of detail in each diorama, this is a surprisingly tactile experience. Characters jump from block to block, but this is done by real human hands, and the attention to each brick, shadow, and ray of light adds to the realism of the experience.

The story, too, is a simple but delightful tale of parental responsibility and a child's imagination, something Lego has always tried to evoke. For the gray-haired parent, play is cast aside for the monotony of work, and for the child, the wonders of the natural world give way to the wonders of the imagination. Robots made from basement parts come to life, and the browns and greens of dioramas inspired by hiking trails and secluded campgrounds give way to the bright primary colors of children's television. But even those themes are threatened and twisted into a single classroom frame that bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the grind of a parent's factory job. A healthy dose of slapstick and childlike naivete keeps The Lego Builder's Journey from deviating too far from its toy box origins, but the darker, industrial nature of the later levels ensures that the more serious ideas land.

Whereas other LEGO games have tended to lean more and more toward the humor and panache offered by the giant, kid-friendly license, Light Brick Studios focuses on what it's actually like to play with small colored blocks. This is a subtle approach, but it succeeds in obfuscating the limited scope of the game and capturing everything from the imaginative freedom that Lego offers to the sensation of handling one block at a time.

In the 35 levels that make up the original mobile version of LEGO Builder's Journey, both the story and the puzzles twist and turn gently, picking up new ideas and dropping them again, all within the brick diorama format. The game's sandbox style is carried through in the early stages, with the few levels that have more obvious solutions often attempting to emphasize a particular theme. Coupled with camera controls that do not allow the diorama to be viewed from all sides, transparency problems occasionally occur. The difficulty curve is steady throughout, and often depends more on the complexity of the bricks used than on the difficulty of the puzzle itself. When the original finale arrives, it is a wonderful monument to the story, the theme, and the design.

Unfortunately, the levels that follow do little to preserve that sense of gentle progression; the series of levels added for the PC version introduce an important new approach. Instead of using complete blocks, these puzzles join fragments together or duplicate blocks that have already been made. The newly implemented fail states are punitive and monotonous. In one example, the three-strike approach erases progress, only to return to the diorama upon completion of a repetitive task. The increased complexity has resulted in a less transparent approach and a poorly defined building system. While the dioramas themselves are as clean and detailed as their predecessors, it is difficult to see these less enjoyable levels as anything more than unnecessary padding to an otherwise skillfully crafted game.

In its beautiful environments and open-ended approach to puzzle solving, "Lego Builders Journey" is perhaps the most authentic and serious Lego game to date, capturing every fun aspect of the original. From the sense of freedom that a pile of Legos provides to the individual blocks between your fingers, "LEGO Builder's Journey" succeeds in recreating not only what Legos are, but what they can become. While the attempts to further develop the elaborate modeling of the first half of the game are unfortunately clumsy and sacrifice much of the gentle, open-ended approach that makes the game so successful, even in this virtual format, through its physicality and tactility, there is no better way to capture what is so beloved in such a The careful and meticulous way in which it is captured makes this game very special.