The Assembly

It's a first person interactive story that's told through the perspective of two different characters: Caleb Pearson and Madeleine Stone where you explore the subterranean medical research facility called The Assembly.

 

The game's overarching narrative about exploring morals and ethics in medical research is interesting enough and it comes across as a game that could be preamble to a larger scale disaster/survival game.

 

The game's graphics are kind of hit and miss. There are some objects that have a low, pixelated texture quality, it's very clear they only made like two NPC models and just copy and pasted them throughout the game, only making changes related to skin and eye colour. The NPC all have the lower half of their faces obscured by masks and hair obscured by a balaclava that make them look like Scorpion or Sub Zero rejects from the early Mortal Kombat games. As such, facial animations are borderline non-existent except for blinking. This is in contrast to the lab's environment design being perfectly satisfactory and one particular section where Madeleine and Caleb's stories intersect for the first time. Madeleine is lead into a suspended laboratory above a chasm, a giant monitor on one side with a map of the world displayed and a series of computers on the other. The setup is very "Hollywood" and it really does a nice job of illustrating that The Assembly really is an underground secret medical lab.

 

Oddly enough, this is where the game presents it's most interesting puzzle element. Sure, there are others before and after it, but they're almost insulting easy and barely worth mentioning. It's a classic doomsday, viral outbreak scenario where you, as Madeleine, need to parse out resources in order to keep loss of life below acceptable limits. It's the most though-provoking puzzle of the game and it's underlying message is all too real. This culminates into the game's peak for me and it's most memorable moment in my play through of this game.

 

The voice acting is also kind of hit and miss. Madeleine's voice acting is perfectly fine in terms of conveying emotion and temperament, whereas Caleb's is a bit more monotonous. By in large, it works well, but there are some scenes where Caleb's voice needed to emit more emotions.

 

Between the two stories, Madeleine's story is the stronger of the two. Her's features more traditional gameplay elements, an exploration of her backstory and better voice acting. Caleb's is more akin to wandering around rooms, opening draws and cabinets and then finding an object to progress the plot.

 

The game apparently has four different endings and at a play time of roughly 2-3 hours, you can burn through the game pretty quickly.

 

Overall, I'd give this game a rating of Hazy.