Assembly
The concept of Assembly is immensely fun: you roam an Ikea trying to stop some cultists from summoning the elder gods using sigils made of flat-pack furniture. The writing swings back and forth between heightened fantasy narration and mundane descriptions of furniture assembly with panache, and the blue-and-yellow color scheme with its clean, friendly sans-serif font helps sell the Ikea atmosphere. The implementation is very smooth.
Despite the many excellent qualities it has going for it, though, the game also has a major flaw: it’s not particularly well signposted, and I often wasn’t sure what I was trying to accomplish or in which order I should be trying to solve the puzzles. The in-game hints weren’t always as helpful as I would have liked, and in a couple places I had to turn to the walkthrough.
Part of the fault was mine, I admit, for not getting to grips with the game’s internal logic; my tendency in an adventure game if I run across a locked door or cabinet is to assume that there’s a key somewhere, for example, but Assembly is looking for more creative solutions. I do think that if the game had been a little longer, I would have been able to settle into this groove and do better problem-solving on my own, so I wish there had been a little more meat to it. (Despite the hour and a half play time estimate, my playthrough was forty-five minutes with a fair amount of going in circles included.)
All in all, though, I enjoyed what the game was doing and would love to see more from this author.
Edit (10/8/23)
Through some conversation with the author, I’ve learned that the hints that I needed actually were/should have been in the game, I just wasn’t seeing them for some reason, so it seems to have been a technical issue rather than an issue with the hint writing per se.