When we went hands-on with Minecraft's RTX update a little over a year ago, which brought full path-traced lighting to the popular game. The results were jaw dropping. Especially when you factor in that Minecraft wasn't really known for its high-end visuals. With LEGO Builder's Journey, we get the first ray-traced game made with Unity - and the result is similarly impressive.

In that is all looks incredible -- even at its most simple. As per our full review:

LEGO Builder’s Journey is given an extra layer of beauty thanks to its use of GeForce RTX-powered real-time ray-tracing and cutting-edge DLSS rendering.

Covering the range of light-sourced effects, from reflections to shadows to global illumination and more, the results are simply gorgeous. These Lego bricks not only look real, but surreal. And that’s because the animation layer that sits on top of the rendering has the air of a high quality stop-motion animated feature.

Which you can see in this video covering the first 40-minutes or so captured in 4K with all settings and ray-tracing elements dialed up and DLSS set to the 'Quality' preset.



As you can see the diorama look and feel coupled with the soothing sounds and warm tones help LEGO Builder's Jounrey hit that puzzle-game zen-like state almost immediately. The immersion it brings even after a few seconds is seamless, where you feel like you're looking in through a window as opposed to playing a videogame on a screen somewhere.

Working closely with LEGO Games and Light Brick Studio, NVIDIA helped bring both RTX-powered real-time ray-tracing and DLSS rendering to the game on PC. The result is a full ray-traced experience that like Minecraft, is taxing on modern hardware. The video was captured on a GeForce RTX 3080 Ti for a reason.

Here's NVIDIA breaking down exactly what's happening in the RTX On version of the game.

Ray Traced Reflections

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Ray traced reflections accurately reflect the entirety of the world through physically based materials as well as global light sources such as the sun, key and fill lights that surround the scene. Rough materials have sparse reflections while glossy surfaces are concise revealing intricate undersides of bricks. Rounded edges of bricks and spherical shapes correctly reflect global light as bright slivers of color.

Ray Traced Shadows

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Ray traced shadows reach even the slightest crevasse between bricks where rasterization limits definition and completeness. The LEGO world becomes grounded as shadows hold to their shape and form as they may on your kitchen table.

Ray Traced Global Illumination

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When looking for global illumination we are taking note of the color bouncing off or bleeding from nearby surfaces as light hits those surfaces. The result is the beautiful expression of color and light of the LEGO world bustling throughout each scene. Vibrant colored bricks underneath the brick-bot are tempered by the earth tone color of nearby illuminated bricks.

Ray Traced Ambient Occlusion

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In contrast to global illumination, with ambient occlusion we are looking for areas where indirect ambient light struggles to reach or is blocked from view. Consequently, we are typically looking at areas that are also in shadow, dimly lit by bounce lighting such as gaps between blocks and ridges around them.

And all of that captures exactly what ray-tracing can bring to table, even when applied on a seemingly simple and straightforward puzzle game. LEGO Builder's Journey is a wonderful example of where in-game visuals are headed, and thanks to being a great little game (translation: it's more than a tech demo) - a must for RTX owners eveyrwhere.