Ustwo Games prides itself on making games for a broad, so-called "casual" audience to enjoyed. "The strategy for the company has been to take what's great about games and deliver them to a casual audience," Dan Gray, chief creative officer at Ustwo Games told Engadget. Each object, therefore, is simpler than its real-life counterpart and has fewer components to contend with. Still, it takes time to break down an object, understand how it works and what needs to be replaced.

Ustwo Games has clearly designed Assemble with Care with touchscreens in mind. It's an Apple Arcade exclusive, though, which means you'll be able to play with a mouse or trackpad on your Mac and a touchpad remote on AppleTV. I played the iPhone version, which uses a portrait orientation exclusively -- on other platforms, the entire game will be flipped sideways and reorganized a little bit. "It's not the same thing, but with dead space left and right. We went through the effort of rebuilding it in landscape and having to maintain different versions," Gray explained.

On a smartphone, the top half of the screen shows the tools and components at your disposal, while the bottom section is saved for whatever you're currently working on. The limited number of parts mean that somehow -- miraculously, even -- your virtual workbench never feels cramped or overwhelming. Everything you need is on a single screen, too, so you never have to dig into sub-menus or secondary pages.

"The 'meditative head space' was really important."

You can rotate your partially completed project and long-press parts you wish to pull off and discard or examine separately. Some elements you can trigger with a single tap -- pressing the play button on the cassette deck, for instance -- to check whether they're working.

Every repair is a multi-step process. With the unashamedly Game Boy-inspired handheld, for instance, I had to take off the rear panels and carefully remove a broken screen and A button. Some of the LEGO-like hardware chips were fried, too, so I swapped those out and reattached the stretchy wires. "The 'meditative head space' is the thing that was really important," Joel Beardshaw, lead game designer on Assemble with Care told Engadget. "It's having something that lets you get into the rhythm of just being with this object and spending enough time to get to know it."

How a typical repair looks on iPhone.

It's not the first time Ustwo has focused on a feeling of zen-like chill. The company's Nordic studio worked with Pauseable, a Danish mental-wellness company, on an "interactive meditation" app called Sway in 2017.

There's an almost indescribable joy and satisfaction to each step. To loosen a screw, for instance, you have to grab the screwdriver and swipe your finger in a clockwise (or was it counterclockwise?) direction. The part will then fly to a nearby cup for safe keeping, almost like a room tidying itself in the Harry Potter universe. "If you pull [the stretchy wires] to their extremity, the phone will start to vibrate a little bit and you can pop them off," Gray said. "It's nothing like how [real] wires work, but it's fun."

The game has plenty of signposting, too. Areas for gluing have a distinct crosshatch pattern to highlight them, and a white silhouette will appear if it's possible to place a part in a particular area. These small visual elements point you in the right direction without giving the entire solution away. "We spent months at the beginning [of the project] trying to get the feel right," Beardshaw said.

Dan Gray, chief creative officer at Ustwo Games.

At first, the team experimented with puzzles that had more tools and 'red herring' parts to play with. "We could have unfurled a tool belt that had six different things in it," Gray said. "[But] that comes with the expectation of being able to glue everything, and screw everything, and use all the tools and the wire, everything. Actually, it made it a spider web of options. It wasn't that enjoyable to play unless you facilitated literally everything."

Clearly, Ustwo Games isn't shooting for absolute realism here. You won't be spending hours with a Haynes instruction manual (a couple of the later puzzles do come with a single-page doodle, though) or learn the difference between a Phillips and hex screwdriver head. "Make no mistake, you will learn nothing about how any of these objects work," Gray said with a chuckle. Each chapter, though, successfully imitates the most important or memorable design features of each object. That makes the repairs delightful and satisfying to solve, even if you know that what you're doing isn't *quite* the real deal.

"We did loads of research up front," Beardshaw explained, "and were like, 'what are the most interesting things in-among these things? What are the bits that are quirky or surprising?' Also, what creates an interesting reaction at the end? What is the [one] thing that you want it to do once it springs to life and you've restored it?"