Asemblance

This is another cheap, easy Gamerscore title that I’m not sure fits into the horrendous category. It’s certainly not a Your Toy, DYING: Reborn or One Eyed Kutkh but it’s not going to be winning any awards for goodness either.

The idea of Asemblance is that you are tying to re-live past memories using some kind of machine but like all experiments of the mind, it all goes sadly, badly wrong and you end up caught in some kind of infinite loop of the same three memories. You gradually explore these memories in different ways to unlock some kind of system error that results in some kind of death or end sequence. I’m not really sure what was going on or why, but supposedly there is a lot of reading material scattered through the memories that provide some semblance of what’s going on.

Gameplay wise, it’s touted as an adventure game but it’s a glorified walking simulator at best. Just because you need to interact with a few items in the environment does not detract from this fact either. Given that the ‘puzzles’ are just as obscure as the story, figuring out how to get to ‘the end’ without the use of a guide is impossible unless you are a super intelligent lifeform. Or you wanted to play the game for countless hours staring at the same rooms over and over again. It’s obscure to the point that the game suffers from no character development and it doesn’t make your average gamer want to invest in it either.

Now, on to the looks and to be fair it excels here. It has to be because there are so many loose pieces of paper that you most likely need to read to work out what’s going on and so being able to see the detail is important.

Musically, I can’t remember much, but it does try to use sound effects to portray mysterious goings on – not that this really mattered as it lost its impact along with the obscure story.

Achievements – 10 Achievements – 1,000 Points

It’s a short achievement list to boot where none are missable and all are story based if you follow through all the endings – not that the endings are different, it’s just the colour of the background that changes. Essentially you get achievements at certain points of the story and once you reach the first ending, there are another 3 achievements for completing it in blue, green and white ‘shift.’

You must go through each ‘shift’ from ‘normal’ to progress from normal to blue to green to white. You do certain things to move through the shifts but it’s all very easy with the exception of the getting into the white shift.

For some reason, getting to the white shift is a timed thing. You need a stopwatch and have to record the time based from when an in-game clock ticks to a certain time and then run to a different room to look through some kind of peep-hole. I’m sure there is a reason why this is what you have to do but figuring this out would likely be enough to qualify for Mensa.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Despite the play on words referenced in the game, Asemblance is a game that’s either too clever for its own good or too obscure for regular gamers. It’s probably a combination of both. Achievements wise, the lot can be scooped up in under an hour. It’s currently retailing at £6.39 which is just outside the less than £5 for easy Gamerscore price tag.