Assemble With Care
Review

Assemble With Care (2019) is a narrative puzzle game from the makers of Monument Valley and is a unique way to consider how physical objects become meaningful and hold our memories. You play a restorer who repairs people's favourite possessions: from family heirlooms to broken statues to complex VCRs. The narrative of the game weaves through the different objects that you fix and the people that love them.

This starts with a little girl who has a broken cassette deck. To fix things you use a variety of tools to unscrew, detach and disassemble each object. This starts as simply needing to replace empty batteries or re-spool tape back into a cassette but later becomes more complex with wires, electronic components and more disassembling.

But this isn't a test of your engineering skill, but how well you can pay attention to how something is made and how you can take it apart. You manipulate each element on the screen to completely disassemble and identify what's not working.

Each item you repair unlocks the precious memory held in the object. This might be a departed parent, a treasured memory or a message from someone far away. In doing this, the game hints at the tension between the things we can fix and the deeper things we cannot, without one eclipsing the other.

Our examiner, Andy Robertson, first checked Assemble With Care 3 years ago. It was re-examined by Jo Robertson and updated 11 weeks ago.