I have a confession to make: I'm not very good at building with LEGO. I only found this out after playing ClockStone Studio's LEGO: Bricktales over the weekend. It's one thing to aesthetically beautifully arrange random LEGOs, and quite another to build architecturally stable structures with only a few blocks and basic guidelines, as "Bricktales" requires of its players.

The game begins simply. You are a young architect called to an abandoned theme park by your grandfather, an eccentric inventor known simply as "Grandpa." Grandpa has built a portal that can take people to another place, but first you must help him restore power to his underground laboratory, where an accident has fried all the systems. This is the tutorial stage, nothing too difficult. You just have to build a simple bridge, reconnect the pipes, flip a switch, and eventually return safely to your grandfather.

From there, you will have to collect five "happiness crystals" so that Grandpa can renovate the abandoned park before the nearby mayor evicts him. These crystals can be found at each of the five stages you travel through during the campaign, and the general flow is the same throughout: arrive at a new location, find out what is making the people in that area unhappy, solve their problems by building things with Legos, and collect Happiness Crystals, Back to Grandpa's place to build rides for the theme park. Lather, rinse, repeat.

As you progress through each stage, it's nice to notice collectible animals, treasure chests, and other little hidden items that you can't yet get unless you unlock special powers. Once you have collected all the powers, however, you are free to return to any stage of your choice and roam freely. This sense of freedom of movement is rewarded by eventually unlocking hidden areas, getting all the collectibles, and eventually buying everything in the cosmetic stores on each level. By doing so, you will get new clothes for the builders and new cosmetic bricks for successful puzzles.

ClockStone Studio, the developer of Bricktales, is best known for its Bridge Constructor series, and this title continues the feel of that series. When you enter the puzzle, you are given all the available parts, an area to assemble them, upper and lower limits, and a few instructions such as "1) don't break anything and 2) build a bridge so that the test robot can cross. Then you are free to build anything that meets those conditions. [For example, watch a parrot perch violently sway as it tries to maintain its balance, or watch a one-ton weight fall directly on a place you forgot to fortify. And with only instructions to "build the perfect pyramid," and no hint system, one can be left pulling one's hair out trying to do exactly that and failing repeatedly.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, this past weekend I discovered that I am not very good at building with Legos. I have no engineering or building skills, so these puzzles were exceptionally difficult, so much so that I had to take regular breaks to avoid getting too frustrated. However, in conquering these puzzles, which seem too easy for Lego enthusiasts, I discovered a greater appreciation for the creative potential of Lego.

What I built was often messy and unpolished, but physically it was fine and met the requirements. On particularly difficult structures, such as spiral staircases and multilevel bridges, I always breathed a huge sigh of relief when the test robot arrived at its destination without breaking everything. It was a relief from frustration to see my messy work succeed.

However, "LEGO: Bricktales" does not always hit the mark in a satisfying way. The humor, built around puns and LEGO jokes, does not always land. The mission structure in the game can become a fetch quest and feel less organic and artificially stretched if it does not directly build a way to solve the problem. The world-building sometimes feels lazy and relies too heavily on puns to connect the narrative. In addition, the architectural puzzles themselves tend to be too much of a free-form, do-what-you-want model of Lego architecture, which may put off some of the game's intended audience.

But if you're looking for a fairly gorgeous LEGO-built environment surrounding an almost Besiege-like level of construction and physics simulation with a few laughs and little effort, this game is perfect. It feels like a tentative next step from the story-driven art game "LEGO: Builder's Journey" that LEGO's in-house game development company, Light Brick Studios, put out a few years ago. With time and improvements, a genuinely great original LEGO game could be released.

As it stands, I had a good time with "LEGO: Bricktales." I was frustrated by the difficulty and conundrum of the puzzles, but the satisfaction I felt when I finally solved them slightly outweighed that. The script wasn't the strongest I've seen in a game this year, but the overall tempo of the game was so fast-paced that nothing, not even the long chain of fetch quests, really dragged on. LEGO Brick Tales may take a while to perfect, but with all the right elements in place, I think it will eventually stand up admirably on its two unsteady legs."