Horizon Lego Adventures Proves Perfect Fit for Nintendo Switch

When Sony announced that Horizon Lego Adventures would land on Nintendo Switch alongside PlayStation 5 and PC, it seemed like an odd pairing at first. But spending half an hour with the game at Summer Game Fest made the logic immediately clear: this is a Lego game that happens to wear Horizon's skin, not the other way around. It's less a brick-by-brick recreation of the sprawling open-world RPG and more a playful reinterpretation—think of it as the kind of adaptation that takes the familiar architecture of a Lego adventure and grafts a prehistoric robot-smashing premise onto it.

The Switch version wasn't an afterthought, scaled down from a PS5 original. Guerrilla Games built both simultaneously, with a dedicated team of engineers optimizing the handheld version in parallel. That decision shaped everything about how the game plays. It features two-player co-op designed from the ground up to work with a single Joy-Con per player, making local multiplayer instant and frictionless. Two heroes—you can pick from Aloy, Varl, and two others—share the same screen and follow each other through lush, post-apocalyptic forests, villages, and caves. There's no split-screen, no compromise. It's the kind of thoughtful design choice that suggests someone at Guerrilla actually understands what makes the Switch special.

Tim Symons, the franchise development lead producer who guided the demo, brought an interesting pedigree to the project. He spent more than a decade at Nintendo before joining Guerrilla five years ago, and he carries that handheld sensibility with him. He was visibly excited about making a Nintendo game for the first time, and he spoke with genuine enthusiasm about the Lego constraints the company imposed—every brick in the game had to be a real piece from Lego's library, verified by the company itself. The team drew inspiration from Lego's own stop-motion films, using that same tactile, brick-built aesthetic rather than bending plastic or cutting corners. Everything you see was designed as actual Lego first, then translated into the game.

Combat is stripped down compared to the original Horizon. You get a single projectile attack—a bow for Aloy, a spear for Varl—plus limited-use power-ups you find while exploring. Machines still have weak points to exploit, and you can set traps by lighting fires or detonating ice barrels, but there's no pausing to target specific components or using Aloy's Focus to override and control enemies. That said, her Focus still works to highlight interactive objects and useful information. You can pick up cultists and hurl them at each other, which lands somewhere between Lego's comedic physicality and Horizon's combat DNA. The result feels simpler than either parent franchise, but it works—movement and action respond cleanly, and the crunchy, tactile feel of Lego is everywhere, from the stop-motion animations to the way everything visibly breaks apart.

The story has been retuned for goofy irreverence. Ashly Burch, who voiced Aloy in the original game, returns here and clearly relishes the chance to play the character for laughs—slapstick moments mixed with knowing parody that strips away the darker elements of the source material. This is a deliberate choice to make the game accessible to kids, which also happens to be smart positioning for a franchise trying to expand its reach. The main campaign runs about eight hours, with post-story content and unlockables—including costumes from other Lego franchises and themed sets—designed to keep players engaged beyond that.

The PS5 version will have some advantages: a 60fps performance mode and those customization options, including light settlement-building mechanics. But the core experience is the same across all platforms. When asked whether this partnership might lead to Aloy appearing in a future Super Smash Bros., Symons laughed and said it would be nice, but that would be Nintendo's call to make.

What emerges from playing Horizon Lego Adventures is a game that knows exactly what it is: a bridge between two audiences. For parents who love Horizon but want to play something with their kids, it fills a specific gap—similar to how Minecraft Dungeons served players who wanted Diablo-style dungeon crawling in a more approachable package. Whether it can stand on its own as a game that justifies itself beyond that niche appeal remains an open question. But based on the opening stages, it's hard not to see why Guerrilla chose the Switch as a co-equal platform rather than an afterthought. The handheld's design philosophy and the Lego formula align in ways that feel almost inevitable in hindsight.