Sure, there aren't many Gamescom previews left to tell you about, but one of the craziest titles on which we could lay our eyes, Main Assembly, certainly could not miss our report.
Wooden cubicles in which to enter while keeping a close eye on the head, small groups of people drinking and laughing, video games, food, video games, alcohol, and other video games: if I had to make a summary of the Swedish booth of Gamescom 2019, I would use exactly these words.
In what can only be confirmed as one of the most tender experiences of the colonial conference, in a small wooden house we got to know the guys from Bad Yolk and their incredible creature, called Main Assembly. We find it really difficult to express in words even the concept of this game, but follow us in the attempt: in it we take command of a small robot that we will use to overcome certain challenges, combining our design imagination with its constructive ability, mechanical that level after level it will push us to broaden our cognitive horizon and to think transversally to overcome the metaphorical (and sometimes literal) obstacle.
You didn't understand anything, did you? Initially neither do we. Let's try to untangle the problem together.
Each "level" of Main Assembly, at least in the main title mode, puts us in front of a goal that at first seems trivial but which, attempt after attempt, proves itself difficult without ever becoming openly hostile towards us: the stage that we were able to observe with the game devs required us, for example, to move a certain amount of packages from the open space in the center of the map into a container; from the basic structure, consisting of a sort of "seat" on which our robotic alter ego rests, we should strive to build (at least in this case) a sort of forklift, starting from the single components up to arrive (as needed) at the programming level of each of them, then adjusting the parameters and assigning that particular command to that particular key. In words it is complex, and we confess that the initial learning curve is slightly steep, but it is a climb to which the legs of our mind adapt easily, a sort of Camino de Santiago that does not lead to inner purification but to a satisfying moment. eureka.
It is difficult to explain the "constructive" freedom (in both senses of the term) that Main Assembly will give you when it arrives in Early Access in early 2020, because it is honestly without comparison in today's panorama, if we exclude the titanic extension of the imagination; even in our test alone we happened to ask the game dev if it was possible to build something X in the Y way and… poof, in two minutes he built what we asked him. Self the assembly mechanics are more user-friendly and the one that will give the most immediate satisfactions, we are sure that the programming part is the one that, against all wishes, will stimulate the intellect and patience of those who dedicate themselves to it; Bad Yolk confessed to us that the Early Access version of Main Assembly will serve precisely to test its genome, to move every grain of virtual dirt, looking for bugs to fix, features to add or mechanics to tweak.
As always, all you have to do is stay tuned for every update about it.
