Today it’s not just about a game, but about a whole genre – so-called “cozy games”, i.e. feel-good games. We still had time after “Superliminal” and played a short but interesting representative of this genre. In “Assemble with Care” we fix things and discover how to create relaxation while preventing boredom.

I’ve played “Cozy Games” before, the two biggest ones were probably “Animal Crossing: New Horizons” and “Stardew Valley”. However, I didn’t stream either because I thought it would be too boring to watch. However, today’s title was short enough to give this type of game a try.

And I think the brevity of this title was an important point in order to avoid boredom. Because although the basic structure is reminiscent of a puzzle game, it is definitely not that. Each repair was an obviously listed order of steps that was never unclear – most levels didn’t even consist of 20 individual steps each.

Still, that was exactly a very relaxing part of this game. You could switch off your brain, click away and have a little feeling of happiness at the end of each level that you made it – even though there was practically no challenge. But the story definitely also contributed to this.

I don’t want to say too much about it, because it obviously can’t be very complex – on the one hand because of the short time, and on the other hand because it’s all about not telling convoluted or deep stories, which would contradict the feel-good idea .

In the end, we always had the feeling that we had helped someone with our repair, thanks to the very beautiful narrative style and the appropriate speaker of the main character; to our limited extent, we made the world a little better. Of course, the idea of repairing broken things (literally or figuratively) rather than throwing them away played a big role here.

This experience was rounded off by beautiful drawings and a generally very mild color style. Many pastel colors and the scenes as drawn as with watercolors calmed rather than irritated, fitting the main idea of the game.

The small and only downside was the controls; I don’t know if the game was developed with a controller in mind, but playing with a mouse was often rather imprecise and you sometimes completely disassemble something several times by accident when you actually just wanted to screw in the last screw. This spoiled the gaming experience a few times – but to be honest, it was only a minimal part in the overall context. Since I often had the feeling that I was simply too hectic, it even led me to take steps more slowly and more consciously. I can’t say for sure whether that was intentional or just a nice side effect.

All in all, I really enjoyed this game, or rather, this experience. It definitely makes me want to try out more “Cozy Games” and play them on stream. It was a short pleasure at around an hour and a half, and it shouldn’t have been much longer – I’m pleased that the golden mean was found here. This genre will definitely be an addition to my games list.

What do you think of the game? Was it too quiet for you, do you like to play something like that yourself or maybe this game is what gave you a taste for it? Join the discussion on Discord!