A Hallmark of a Mobile Game
ustwo's Assemble with Care understands what makes mobile games great
In some parts of the world, it's officially holiday movie season. It’s such a big deal that there’s an entire subculture around commenting on their absurdity. While some of the situations are… uh… truly absurd, the staying power of the format suggests that there's something people really do enjoy about these types of stories. Until Assemble with Care came along, there hadn't been many games that fit that slice of life lesson genre. It fits that Hallmark mold: it’s a low-stakes adventure with a positive message about the importance of caring for the people and things in our lives.
A lot of games have pretty epic stakes. Even games, like last week's kid-themed Cardpocalypse, the stakes were saving your friends from annihilation by their favorite cartoons. And in a game like Mini Motorways, you’re still talking about the stress of managing an entire city.
Chill games like Dream Daddy or the more recent Unpacking have started popping up, but often they can still ask for larger time commitments to fully enjoy or aren’t available on mobile. This made playing Assemble with Care a breath of fresh air. It was a story I could step into for five minutes at a time, or finish in a single sitting.
The story follows our main character’s adventure to the fictional Bellariva during a festival. You play as someone who loves travel, has a knack for fixing things, but might have communication and connection issues with your parents. When you enter the town, you set up shop as a repairperson, offering to help people around town as they prepare for the festival. The 14 chapters revolve around a restaurant and a pair of sisters, and a father and daughter reconnecting through old memories. As you fix the items you help them repair their relationships with one another.
It's very Hallmark, in a good way. Unlike the "bad holiday movie" genre, Assemble doesn't need to mess around with tropes or gimmicks to hold my attention. It has a direct theme (thoughtfulness and caring) and it infuses the mechanics and the story with that sort of thoughtfulness in a way that felt heartwarming.
Careful Does It
Assemble reinforces the idea of care in every element of the game. It argues that care gives us the time and space to listen, savor, and connect with the people and moments in our lives. The story emphasizes your ability to listen to other people and communicate with them, and the game reinforces this by slowing down the speed of your interactions.
The interactions (you have to tap and hold to take items apart) force you to slow down as you go. And the particular places that each item gets put when you shelve it reinforces that idea. In fact, the game will often have you put together an item only to take it back apart when your customer suggests a small tweak. When you take apart various items, you don't put them in a menu screen, the game organizes them into the type of orderly diagram you might see in an instruction manual. Your character’s life might be a bit of a mess, but your character is clearly fastidious with attention to detail.
Tabletop game reviewers like Shut up and Sit down talk about the tactile feel of board games: the chunkiness of tiles or the aesthetic of playing cards. Assemble shows how sounds, haptics, and clever UX patterns can replicate a lot of that tactile feel, a sense of physical presence. There isn't the same frenetic pace of clicking or flicking items around the screen. Assemble forces players to slow down.
That slowness is the type of thing that could easily get annoying if the puzzles were complicated or required you to memorize a lot of different steps in order to put a piece back together. But because the puzzles are straightforward to solve (each puzzle probably about 5-10 minutes at the most), that sense of care created an ethos compared to most games that (rightly for them) prioritize efficiency of actions.
You're Reading Journey to the Core
Does Assemble with Care belong in the Arcade?
Yes. I started this email with something of an assumption: I don't need to own a Macbook because Apple Arcade games are fundamentally phone games. If there's a game that validates that assumption, it's Assemble with Care.
It's not hard to see why it’s on many of the best Apple Arcade game lists. It feels like it was designed for a smartphone. The game is easy to pick up and put down at almost any point. The stories are chunked into small sections with wide margins and illustrations so you can read while the narration runs. And even the puzzles are easy enough to pick up and put down because there are no failure conditions, and the goals are consistent across each level (take the device apart, find the broken piece, replace it, and put the device back together).
It's also the type of game that feels like a great fit for a subscription service. The structure wouldn’t work well as a freemium model, and it would struggle to find a large audience as a small premium title. Hopefully, Apple will continue to find small gems like this to fill out the service.
If you’d like to try it out, you can find it on iOS here.
What's Next for Journey to the Core?
Thanks for following along with my first month! I can't believe it's already been 4 posts. I'm going to try out a shift in focus while still releasing an Apple Arcade review every week. Rather than pick games at random, I'm going to put together groupings of 3-5 games around a particular theme. I'll also let you know ahead of time if you want to "play along" and share your thoughts.
If you’ve been enjoying the writing and know someone who might be interested, please share it. It’s the best way to help my writing find new audiences!
This upcoming series is going to be (roughly speaking) point and click adventure! The goal is to take a look at a few different games with a similar theme and see how they compare with one another and fit on the subscription service.
Tangle Tower
Over the Alps
Mutazione
Layton’s Mystery Journey+
Jenny LeClue