Developed by Ustwo
Warning that there will almost certainly be spoilers ahead! Skip ahead for my honest thoughts (and heavy spoilers)
What a wholesome little game. I had such a cozy time with the story during autumn/winter. I did admittedly try and prolong the game as much as I could so that I had an easier puzzle game I could go back to if I was feeling overwhelmed.
The general gist is you follow the story of Maria who is estranged with her parents and travels to the town of Bellariva for a short stay. Maria is very good at fixing things and word of her talents quickly makes its way around. The game takes you through the stories of a small group of townsfolk asking for your help to fix sentimental items. This game isn’t very long, so the next section might not be the longest.
If you’re looking for a nice wholesome game with a cute series of storylines that might bring a tear to your eye, the Assemble with Care is an ideal game for a rainy afternoon.
From this point there will be incredibly HEAVY SPOILERS
I do tend to find narrative games a little tedious as most of the time when I want to play something, I just want to get straight in (introduction sequences don’t count). I did struggle to be patient at the beginning and would skip the dialogue whilst reading the text, however I did warm to the charm of the voice acting quite quickly.
The game takes you through an item per chapter with the first being to unpack! The objects you have to fix do get slightly harder, but not by a whole lot to be honest. I think my favourite one was the projector (above!) because one of the stories you follow is about two sisters who are slightly estranged. Helena moved to the big city a long time ago and her sister, Carmen runs a small cafe in Bellariva and relies on her sister to lend her money occasionally. Helena visits Carmen for the town festival but seems to do so begrudgingly.
The projector really delved into how the two grew up and how the two became so separated showing pictures on a slide show of how happy they were as children. I just thought it was such a wholesome moment and the dialogue of Helena realising she hadn’t done right by her sister the whole time just really hit me.
I think my second favourite was fixing the music box of a father who is too busy with work to focus on his daughter Izzy. The mother in this situation had died a while ago and the music box played the song that she used to sing to her child. The journey between the dad and daughter becoming closer and him realising that he was becoming his father by focussing on work rather than his child also just made for such a wholesome conclusion to their story.
Admittedly, I was more invested in the sisters as I feel like it was a more complex story rather than one person being completely at fault but both stories were pretty good.
As well as the people in Bellariva, you also discover that Maria (our protagonist) hadn’t spoken to her parents in over a year and the game ends with her finally having the courage to call her parents just as she’s about to leave.
Overall, I thought the game was sweet and definitely a great cozy game. I think that the puzzles could have been harder but I also appreciate that it’s about the journey and telling a story. I would recommend you play it if you want something light with an adorable narrative, and you can definitely smash it out in an hour if you really wanted to!
Images taken from IMDB and the Apple App Store
If you made it this far, thanks for reading. Feel free to like this post or leave a comment if you have thoughts on the game, or just want to say hi.
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