Monument Valley devs fix up a PC debut for Assemble With Care
Warranty void if opened
After being robbed of two of the best little puzzlers on mobile, Monument Valley developers Ustwo Games are finally making their PC debut with Assemble With Care. Arriving on Steam later this month, Ustwo's pastel-painted repair 'em up has you dissecting people's junk - and their personal problems - before putting it all back together again. In this economy, who can afford to be an engineer without doing a little counselling on the side?
Ustwo's previous games being a pretty big deal over on phones, Assemble With Care was an obvious pick for Apple Arcade's launch lineup last September. Now, they plan to take their device disassembler to desktops on March 26th.
Assemble With Care puts you in the eyes of Marie, a sort of travelling tinkerer who's arrived in the town of Bellariva to help folks fix up their stuff. Through a lovely, tactile interface, you're tasked with taking apart a bounty of old 80s tech - clocks, cameras, tape players and the like - to work out what's wrong with the thing, fix it up good, then put everything back together, good as new. It's painted in a wonderfully warm pastel palette, framing a story that suggests it's really people wot are broken, y'see? There's no taking apart your neighbour and putting him back together again, mind.
Those multi-platform rascals over at Eurogamer took a look at it during their Apple Arcade round-up - not particularly taken by Assemble's storytelling, but enraptured by the simple pleasures of disassembling junk.
"As a piece of storytelling, this is absolutely fine," Eurogamer's Christian Donlan admitted. "As a study in the wordless pleasure of fixing stuff, though, it really sings. Monument Valley asked you to look afresh at the tricksy surfaces of the world. Assemble with Care is more concerned with what lies beneath."
Admittedly, there's a fun irony in a game about repairing broken tech making its debut on a hardware platform that's historically been pretty hostile towards DIY repairs. Moving to Steam will likely lose the physical action of deconstructing a telly with your fingertips, but what PC owner hasn't gotten down and dirty with a screwdriver? Welcome to the home computer, Ustwo - we've got enough broken rigs and patchwork repair jobs to keep you busy for decades.
Assemble With Care unpacks on March 26th on Steam for £5.79 / $7.99.