The first thing you see when you load up Assemble With Care, a stylish puzzle g✨ame from the studio behind Monument Valley, is a vintage Walkman (or close enough) with a cassette tape floating tantalisingly above it. You grab the tape wღith your finger or mouse, drag it into the player, and shut the plastic cover with a pleasant click.
Then you grab hold of the coiled yellow cable from a pair of retro headphones, which bounces around with satisfyingly simulated physics. You connect it to the Walkman, hit play, and the device whirs to life. Lo-fi '80s music, smothered in a layer of warm tape fuzz, begins to play, and the game's story is suddenly set in motion.
It's a perfect introduction to the game, evoking its wistful, nostalgic atmosphere, while also giving you a simple taste of the tactile puzzles to come. You play as Maria, a woman who arrives in the idyllic, vaguely European city of Bellavaria and informs the locals that, should they need repairs or antiques restored, she's the person to call.
Your first job is fixing an old tape recorder, which is a simple case of replacing the batteries. You unscrew the battery compartment by twirli𝐆ng the screwdriver, knock out the batteries, and push in some new ones. To finish, you stick a pencil in a loosened cassette to wind the tape back in. When you play it, a woman sings.
It's the voice of the late mother of the girl whose tape player you just fixed. You don't just fix things in Assemble With Care—you fix people too, helping them come to terms with problems or trauma in their lives. This is an extremely sentimental game. Maybe even a little too saccharine for its own good at times, in fact. But it's very nice.
As Maria spends more time in Bellavaria, getting to know the locals and their hang-ups🔥, she tackles increasingly complicated repair jobs—including a vintage camera, an antique music box, a retro handheld games console, and a rotary phone. All these objects are beautifully designed and a joy to deconstruct, repair, and rebuild.
The game is never hard, but some later jobs are trickier—particularl𒁃y ones involving wiring up circuit boards. But what connects every puzzle, no matter the difficulty, is how immenꦚsely satisfying it is to tinker with these objects. Everything feels so clicky, chunky, and tactile, making them an absolute delight to just interact with.
You can finish the game in 45 minutes, but considering it only costs around $5, it's a small price to pay for something so polished and well-made. It plays with the concept in some interesting ways too, like when you briefly become a chef and have to whip up a bowl of vegetable soup with the same grabby, draggy interface.
Assemble With Care is an entertaining, undemanding, and gorgeously presented puzzle game—but it is quite mawkish, so you'll have to decide whether you can stomach the occasionally overbearing sentimentality of it all. You could always skip the story, but the context of what you're fixing and why really adds to the experience.