The LEGO Group is wrapping up a month-long experiment in LEGO Islands within Fortnite with today’s launch of the LEGO Dark Space experience.
LEGO Dark Space is a level that you can find within Fortnite – either in the LEGO Islands section or with the code 5633-3820-8944 – giving players a creepy level to navigate, completing puzzles and challenges to make it through the space station, using lights to avoid monsters, and eventually try to escape.
Through the month of October, The Lego Group has launched three custom made experiences within their broad collaboration with Fortnite, first providing a 3D platformer in Lego Parkour Worlds set in the Lego Dreamzzz universe. This was followed by Lego Chasers vs. Hunters, again featuring the Dreamzzz universe as players battle for control over a map, blasting away at world items (and one another) to acquire dream sand. And then there’s Lego Monster Fishing, with a giant tentacle monster beneath the surface of an otherwise calm fishing and town improvement game.
This all feeds into Lego Dark Space – something completely different. Something a bit darker.
Starting off with a tentacled alien terror attacking you and a fellow astronaut on a dusty Mars-like planet, you race to get inside the space station and try to make your way to a rocket to blast off to safety. What stands between you and that rocket, though, is a labyrinth dark and spooky corridors and rooms, aliens on patrol, and some light puzzles to solve.
It’s actually surprisingly effective, shifting to a first person view of a station that’s been constructed entirely out of Lego bricks and chunky Lego props. All you have to hand is a flashlight that lazily follows the direction that you’re looking, and a map of the level that you can use to navigate to each of the puzzles.
With no weapons to hand, you will have to avoid the Lego aliens that patrol the corridors, though their routes don’t intersect with puzzle rooms, giving you safe havens to reach without stress for when you’re solving puzzles. These can be surprisingly inventive, like matching the shadows of objects or blending colours to match, or they can be as simple as hitting a few triggers. Once all 10 have been completed, you’re on to the home stretch.
It can be played solo or in co-op (matchmade or otherwise), with players having five lives that will send you back to the beginning, though with puzzles remaining completed.
It’s all intended as a bit of a demonstration of what the Lego asset kits in Fortnite are able to produce, and in that regard Team Unite has done a good job… though they inevitably butt up into the limitations of Fortnite as a UGC game creating platform. Unreal Engine can create fantastic worlds, but once you’re abstracted from a game engine, it’s difficult to get a truly polished experience.
Flicking to and from the map would often see the world disappear or switch view temporarily back to third person, some of the puzzles are a bit finicky in their style, and as effective as the flashlight lag is for instilling a little bit of fear in you, I can’t be sure it’s truly intentional.
Still, it shows the potential of this creative playground, in combination with the trio of preceding Lego Islands games. And the whole Mystery of the Monolith loosely links the four together with clues and codes in previously released levels that can unlock things in this finale.
It also goes hand in hand with a streaming collaboration, with SypherPK, Lachlan, Loserfruit and Ali-A amongst the first to set foot in the labyrinthine level… and then set to be trapped and imprisoned by the Monolith. Players will be able to follow in their footsteps and then vote on who to release between now and 12th November, with a reward being exclusive Dark Studies and Eternal Restlessness décor bundles.
LEGO’s collaboration with Fortnite has been and intriguing one to watch from afar, combining two things that millions upon millions of children are no doubt obsessed with. This month and the Mystery of the Monolith shows that this partnership can absolutely go further in future.
