Assemble With Care is a beautiful game that sees you take control of Maria, a traveling antique restorer who arrives in Bellariva just before their annual festival, ready to help the locals with all their repairing needs. The gameplay is at its heart a puzzle-slash-simulation style manipulation of objects, finding their breaks and repairing them with a lick of glue, a new circuit board, or whatever else each item needs. More than antiques though, through Maria’s gentle and empathetic nature, you begin to rebuild the relationships of the characters in the game.
Lasting only around an hour and a half (actually that was the second time I played it before writing this – the first play-through might have been closer to two hours), I really wanted more gameplay at the end of Assemble With Care. I found the puzzle of deconstructing, fixing, and restoring broken items fun and engaging. However, the gameplay is in service of the story and the characters, and they had all reached satisfying conclusions. Maria got the two sisters to see eye to eye and impressed the importance of switching work off upon the widowed father, and her time in Bellariva was concluded.
Despite its short playtime, Assemble With Care manages to create fully fleshed-out characters and a sense of place with its beautiful art and writing. There aren’t traditional cut scenes so to speak, more like you leaf through the pages of a book which is narrated out loud by voice actors who really embody their characters. This game truly proves that you don’t need much at all to create characters that are believable and whole people with flaws and passions. I really felt connected to sisters Carmen and Helena and understood their relationship and the frustrations they each had with the other. I also really understood the father-daughter dynamic that exists between Izzy and Jacob, and the unspoken weight of his wife/her mother’s death that gets between them.
Making me care about the relationship dynamics between two characters I’m spending less time with than the length of one of my lectures feels like a big ask, so it’s really impressive that Assemble With Care managed it twice. I know it’s a pretty small cast of characters, but it felt perfectly pitched to me. It feels like a real lesson in characterisation.
The game did a brilliant job of making me think about my relationship with the items in my life too. Everything Maria (and thus the player) fixes is considered to retain its worth by the owner despite the fact that it’s no longer functioning as it should. Nothing is so broken as to be unfixable. In a world where everything is disposable, and technology comes with a depressingly inevitable sense of built-in obsolescence as new models need to be sold every year to keep profits high, Assemble With Care made me really consider that deeply. Why pay so much to get something repaired when you can get a new one for the same price? The question becomes one of value instead of worth, the environmental impact takes a back seat. I really think we as a society need to change our attitudes about this.
Assemble With Care is on Steam (I played it on my Steam Deck!) but apparently, it’s also on Apple Arcade and it feels like the perfect game to play on the train or in some downtime. We all deserve a little moment of mindfulness in our days.
There’s a really cool detailed art breakdown by one of the game’s developers, I highly recommend giving it a look.
Game: Assemble With Care
Developer: ustwo games
Publisher: ustwo games
Platforms: PC, Apple Arcade
Before you go, some housekeeping notes.
It’s quite expensive to run a blog like this. I just spent some money in the Steam Sale to get a few games to write about for you, but if you like my writing and want to support me in doing it, converting to a paid subscription would help a lot. Sharing the blog and posts is also really helpful – Twitter suppresses Substack links so it’s pretty hard to grow here. You sharing the posts, and also liking/commenting helps a ton.
I’ve written up a directory page of sorts, organising all the games I’ve covered by playtime. Check it out in the menu at the top of the page or click here to see it if you like.
Corsair sent me a keyboard! They were doing some influencer outreach for it and because I write SO MUCH (university, Brig, ReadWrite, Quick Play, most of my communication with friends and family to name but a few) I figured I’d throw my hat in the ring. They sent me the wireless 75% size version of the K65 and I used it to write this post. It was a really nice change from using the terrible keyboard I have for my iPad and I’m so grateful to have been given this opportunity. Plus it’s so cute, please enjoy these photos and if you can leave a little love on my Instagram post I’d be very grateful.
I will be taking note of all the games you cover here and any I haven't personally played I will definitely be trying under your recommendation!
It sounds like a game I’ve played a bit called ‘A Little To The Left’ which is also on Steam, but with a proper story! Definitely sounds like the sort of thing I could play and chill out with.