Playing (with) Lego doesn’t have to be pure escapism. In telling Horizon’s story of environmental collapse and capitalism gone wild, Lego Horizon Adventures puts a layer of kid-friendly plastic building block abstraction between the concepts and the increasingly inevitable reality. And that makes it not only manageable, but also shareable.

Lego Horizon Adventures (out Nov. 14) feels like a game made by the latter. A “Lego-fied” adaptation of the hit PlayStation game Horizon Z er o Dawn (2017), its story is a kid-friendly send-up of the original game’s bleak sci-fi setting,