ustwo games: Assemble with Care
If you ever wanted to muck about in a picture book, ustwo games’ Assemble with Care does this beautifully. With oil pastel digitalized graphics and a move-along arrow, the story unfolds with large crisp font and syntactic structure that reminds one of a child’s book. The underlying story behind the little tasks though hints more at of the troubles hanging over many adult heads’ that can’t be fixed as easily as a tapedeck or a rotary phone.
The music is calming and the color palette meditative for solving small scale puzzles. There are enough hints that make it relaxing, rather than frustrtaing. It does not require a full on side-by-side wiki to accomplish tasks. It is exceptionally rail heavy, and that’s okay when you don’t want to go adventuring around.
My singular complaint is in the use of the screwdriver within the mechanics. I tried this out on my laptop without a mouse, just the trackpad, and that doesn’t always work that well for this application. I found that if I *very* gently pulled my index finger down on the left side of the trackpad I could unscrew the screws and if I then pushed my finger back up on the left side, it would rescrew – wish a lot of work. That was a few fixes in before I figured it out without just brute forcing the thing. I would like to say it is probably either easier with a mouse or maybe a joystick…depends on if it would require you to rotate the joystick or move it up and down. The initial thought I had when trying to fix the tape deck was to swirl my finger in a spiral on the trackpad – that did not yield results. So, there’s the one heads-up. But, it really isn’t a big deal in the grand scheme of the story.
I picked it up on a Steam sale for $4. Knowing the amount of work that went into the art and voice acting, it’s hard to feel like that’s about all the game is worth, but I really wouldn’t pay much more than that sales price. It’s usually $8, and that’s probably more fair to the game designer and all the other people who went into making it, but it doesn’t feel like it has much re-playability and the overall mechanics feels…simple? Is simple the right word?
Anyways. It’s pretty in a storybook kind of way. It didn’t keep me engaged for more than about 4 ‘jobs’ at a given time, but that’s probably alright if you’re only killing 20 minutes. I would say, if I were to play it in a killing time mode, that the typography is at least large enough to be comfortable on a SteamDeck. Haven’t tested that. I would imagine this would be easily compatible.
Suggest it? ….ehhhh? It’s not bad. But being reminded of all the grown up stresses underlying all the broken things that the main character is able to fix isn’t something I find escape worthy. If you’re looking for a very subtle amount of drama, this might be up your ally. I mean, the game is titled Assemble with Care after all. It’s hinting not only at being gentle with the items you are fixing, but also empathy and care for the people you are helping when fixing those items, and knowing that there are just some things you cannot fix.
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