Setup: iPhone 11 Pro
Developer: UsTwo Games
Version: 1.1.4
Released: 9/19/2019
Arriving with the first wave of Apple Arcade titles, ustwo games’ Assemble With Care tells the story of Maria, an itinerant tinkerer with a talent for fixing even the most complex items. She’s been traveling for an indeterminate amount of time, seeing the world and, most importantly, fixing the world’s antiques. With her trusty toolset and her expert skills, she arrives in idyllic Bellariva by train on the eve of a citywide food festival.
ustwo is perhaps best known for the Monument Valley franchise, and upon first glance the two games couldn’t be more different. However, ustwo’s trademark style of hiding complexity under simplicity is here in force, with puzzles unfolding out of puzzles. Every enclosure whose screws you remove shows you a little bit more of the big picture. When you have everything laid out in front of you, every moving part tells a story. From cameras to watches, from neon signs to Game Boy knockoffs, every moment spent replacing old transistors and switching out bad wires and gears is a moment spent learning more about your clients.
I suppose it’s only appropriate to mention, then, that ustwo games was accused of union-busting activities last October after the company fired Assemble With Care’s senior programmer Austin Kelmore after he tried to organize a Game Workers Unite/Independent Workers Union of Great Britain branch at the company. Given our normal editorial policy of not supporting or giving press to accused union busters or abusive workplaces, that would be the end of the article. But because we’re in Apple Arcade land right now, the situation’s a bit different.
Welcome to the inaugural review in our new series, “Down at the Arcade,” an endeavor to thoroughly review every Apple Arcade game that exists. Why am I doing this? Because I deeply loathe myself. But more importantly, I want to be able to provide a resource for curious new Apple Arcade users – should such a person exist.
ustwo and Apple are both uniquely problematic companies in their own right, and their histories are kind of intertwined. After all, Monument Valley was one of the first “serious” mobile games that wasn’t simply a port or adaptation of a larger property, and it bolstered Apple’s App Store reputation after launch.
The most interesting aspect of Assemble With Care is the tinkering. While simplified, the way in which you interact with each item that needs fixing is meant to mirror real life, more or less. Every item in the game can be fixed, with enough glue, elbow grease and determination. The same can’t exactly be said about Apple products, which are notoriously hard to disassemble without the right set of (proprietary) tools. Apple does not recommend that users take apart their own devices, instead offering a constrained variety of mail-in and carry-in options that ultimately leave customers at the mercy of the company and its authorized retail partners. Users who do try to take their products apart themselves are met with voided warranties and potentially refused service in the future.
Whatever their justification for doing so, Apple has invited much criticism concerning their refusal to recognize customers’ rights to repair their own products. While the company even took steps to provide parts and training to so-called “Independent Service Providers,” shops were not happy to find out that Apple would be charging heavily for first party parts.
Assemble With Care, then, sits in a weird place: As a small, premium game on the Apple Arcade storefront, it has the opportunity to inspire players to explore engineering and the mechanics of physical objects. Just, don’t do that on the devices they’re playing on, I guess.
(We’re not the first to notice this connection, either. Nicole Carpenter reviewed the title for Polygon. “Our stuff has become harder to repair as technology gets more complex, and the companies that make it all aren’t always interested in helping consumers fix their devices,” she wrote. “But it wasn’t always like this.”)
Right-to-repair activism is a reaction to a strange intellectual property argument that claim that only the company who makes a product has the right open it up and repair it, lest “sensitive company secrets” pertaining to the manufacture of the devices in question fall into the hands of competitors and ripped off. Right-to-repair activism calls this ridiculous, and demands that ordinary customers should be able to order a repair kit directly from Apple – or use their own – to fix their products themselves.
While Assemble With Care may not make you want to take to the streets, don a mask and use a set of jeweler’s screwdrivers to take your iPad apart, you might still find yourself wondering more about right-to-repair, and just what is inside your devices. For the strong-stomached, check out this video from JerryRigEverything.
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