Assemble is one of the initial offerings through Apple Arcade. Made by the same team that has put together the immensely popular Monument Valley games, it exists as almost a short, side story. Its good - but it isn't great - and its short playtime makes it a perfect showpiece for the most obvious Apple Arcade use case.
Every single article about the Apple Arcade initial offerings, whether a PR friendly piece or otherwise, seems to mention Assemble and its lineage with Monument Valley. And, to a large extent, that is useful - the game has many of the same mechanically satisfying puzzles as Monument Valley. It isn't just a Monument Valley clone, though, as Assemble uses the guise of repairing 80's ear electronics as its primary puzzle design rather than architectural dreamscapes, and Assemble generally shies away from perspective based puzzles.
So the gameplay - if you have familiarity with the Room series, you have a great frame of reference. An object is placed in front of you, and using intuitively mapped gestures, you examine the object, take it apart, and then put it back together. Assemble smartly doesn't put much in between you and the puzzle - the only tool is a screwdriver - and there is no interface or HUD during puzzle solving. In fact, at one point I was miffed when I couldn't find a restart button, only to discover the omnipresent cup of coffee acts as a menu during the puzzle sequences.
And that brings me to the next point - is there a need for a restart button? Honestly, probably not. The gameplay doesn't rely on the player making any insightful connections or discoveries, and instead opts for asking how well you can pick up the context clues the game offers to complete the challenges. You don't need an understanding of the objects themselves as most pieces in the game only have one interaction making it mostly "Select a piece, see what highlights, connect piece to highlighted area." There are a couple of wiring things that could be done incorrectly, but the puzzle offers helpful 1,2,3 markers to show you the way. There is a really, really good moment in the opening tutorial that hits on the internet meme of understanding the winding of a cassette tape, and I suppose if you have never seen a record player before you might be momentarily confused by the idea of RPMs, but again, the game offers enough hand holding that I doubt anyone will stumble.
This all begs the question - what is the gameplay supporting? Much like last year's Donut County, where the gameplay was mostly in support of telling a quirky, fun story, the same is true here. Except where Donut County used absurdism to explore its characters with surprising depth, Assemble tosses any sense of subtlety in favor of stuffing its emotional messaging down your throat. The entire game is short (my "Screentime" is showing 1 hour and 41 minutes, and that includes sitting it down while I rocked a baby back to sleep) and while there is more story telling than gameplay, it is still abbreviated. That can be great - efficiency in story telling has its merits - but here, it cheapens the experience. Characters meet the protagonist and within 6 words declare "I work all the time because I never felt like my father approved of me" or "I'm lonely because my mother died and my father works to avoid dealing with his grief." You then fix a treasured item, the character gives it to someone who is not currently meeting their emotional needs, and within another two sentences the conflict is resolved and people are happily emoting.
So now that I've ripped into most of the games features, one must ask why Apple would promote this so heavily. Of course there are the practical concerns of the excellent developer track record (or the fact that a journalist can spend less than 2 hours and get the full experience), but there must be something compelling. And there is - its the production. The production values here rival anything being released for $60 on a major platform. The voice acting is crazy good, and the story vignettes have sound effects layered over the narration. The music is mild and unobtrusive and used to further the story telling, and again, its all done perfectly. I even have some thoughts about the use of JRPG-style character portraits and postage stamp designs for the different settings that I might go into deeper elsewhere, but suffice to say that if you needed to tell 30 minutes of story interspersed with gameplay, this is how you would do it. Did I mention the voice acting yet? Its that good (although... anyone who has spent any amount of time in Britain will cringe when the daughter somehow doesn't have the same accent as her father, or how the sisters sound like they were each raised on the other side of the country).
Other production high points - the interfaces are clean and fit with the overall theme, and incredibly intuitive. The designs of the items that you take apart and assemble are phenomenal. The puzzles are all logical, even if they are numbingly easy. And even if the characters are all a bit flat and one-note, they are memorable.
Now, the question with most app store games comes down to "Is it worth it?" and this is where the real value of Apple Arcade comes in. As stated above, even with some idle time, I've clocked under 2 hours start to finish, and I don't see any reason to return to Assemble unless I decide I want to grab screenshots to fit into this article. If I didn't listen to all of the beautiful narration and instead played with the sound off, I doubt I would have gone over an hour. Last year's Donut County retailed for (I believe) $3.99 and I took about 3 hours in my first playthrough, and have since played through it twice more and gone back to mess with a couple interesting levels after that.
And this, to me, seems to be the joy behind Apple Arcade. Would I recommend Assemble at even a $3.99 price point? Probably not (except to say that a cup of coffee is the same price and lasts even less than the hour and a half that Assemble does). I don't even know if I'd plunk down $0.99 for something like this. And, similarly, does this game, with its full voice acting and sound design, get made if they can only charge a dollar per pop? Probably not. But - if I'm already paying $5 per month for access, and if Apple is going to throw money at a developer to produce something, this works, and quite perfectly. I have my active Arcade license, I downloaded Assemble, have played it, and looked at it a second time, and now I'll move onto the next experience.
And that is a part of the beauty - the developers didn't need to bloat the experience to justify a $5 per game price point. They don't have to lock additional levels behind additional fees. They don't have to show ads that break up the experience (I actually took me a little while to realize how bizarre it is that the game never once asked me for money or displayed an ad). They don't have to invent daily quests to keep me coming back for more. They don't have to hack in some sort of PvP to give me a leaderboard to climb and thus power creep to spend money on. There is no advantage to forcing additional grinding. And to top it all off, if this was the ONLY game I wanted to play right now, I could just pay the $5 for a one month period, play it, and cancel.
I think, therefore, the only potential downside is, what happens if I want to pick this back up in 6 months, or a year, or 5, or 10? Will it be available to me?
In conclusion, Assembly wants to be a game but offers only the barest of gameplay, wants to be a story but tells it all within a thousand words, and wants to be a product but is instead an advertisement for the Apple Arcade. However, anyone with an Arcade subscription and an hour should pick this up, put in headphones, and experience the ride - its low impact but also low involvement, and recommended for those reasons.
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