The Assembly Hands-On

As the current PlayStation VR launch line up resembles as a wasteland of throwaway gimmicky titles, it's refreshing to see that Farnborough-based indie nDreams has carved a different path, one that is narrative-driven and more grounded in reality. The title is the first fully-fledged release from the studio and has been turning heads since its E3 debut in 2014. Whilst attending an exclusive press event held at nDreams' studio we had the opportunity to play through the first six chapters of the game and delved deep into the morally questionable world of The Assembly.

Concealed deep underground and cut free from the moral restraints of society is The Assembly, a secret organisation where values are compromised in the pursuit of scientific discovery. What is unclear, however, is what secrets they have locked away and just how far they would go to retain their hushed existence. The intriguing narrative was penned by Tom Jubert, who has previously lent his talents to the likes of The Swapper and Binary Domain.  

Cast at the forefront of The Assembly's 12-chapter story are two protagonists; Madeline Stone and Caleb Pearson. Unwillingly selected by The Assembly, Madeline finds herself torn from her old life as an aspiring teacher and is pushed through an intensive induction program. Whereas Cal works directly inside the organisation's network of laboratories and is on a pursuit of uncovering The Assembly's darkest secrets. The trials that you partake in as Madeline as part of her introduction are puzzle-sections, and contrast deeply to the more exploration heavy areas where you play as Cal. Having the opportunity to play as two different characters helps to evoke curiosity in the story as you are constantly being fed new information from two different perspectives.

During the title's opening section Madeline is strapped to a gurney and wheeled into The Assembly, appearing motionless and disorientated. While you are left to take in your surroundings you'll catch a glimpse of several hints that signal the severity of The Assembly's operations. These stem from its remote desert location to its impervious level of security, with cameras around the perimeter pinpointing your every move. As you enter the elevator and descend into the depths of the bunker, snapshots of labs will flash before you revealing the enormity of their operation.

The story later switches to Cal who is left searching for answers after making a curious discovery. Sections featuring Cal are particularly slow-paced, giving you the freedom to explore and dig through labs full of empty cupboards to your heart's content. Most of your time in the labs will be spent searching for codes, inspecting samples and finding data to uncover the true motives of The Assembly. Inspecting samples under a microscope was an interesting mechanic to implement in VR, as it feels like you're actually peering down the lens when examining batches of cells.

The Assembly's moody cold palette and ambient sounds work to create an atmosphere that feels frightfully tense, especially when you're trespassing in your co-workers offices and prying for information. When entering a new room there's the unsettling sense that somebody may be soon to return as computers remain active, speakers boom with music, and experiments are ongoing

If you have expert sleuthing skills, you may stumble upon additional information or be able to obtain codes to grant you access to rooms hidden off the main path. As well as enhancing replayability, the extra information offers clarity to character's actions and may even change your entire perspective on the story. During the early section of the game you'll be engaging with a number of objects and it isn't always immediately clear if they will have an impact. An action as small as throwing away a co-workers sandwich is enough to trigger a chain of events that wouldn't have otherwise have happened.

While being assessed by The Assembly, Madeline is put through a series of trials to identify her skills as a new recruit. The first is a puzzle where the goal is to slide a yellow block onto its corresponding tile. This may sound simple enough, but the grid is obstructed by a number of obstacles, which must be lowered by sliding other blue and purple blocks into the correct place. We may have seen similar puzzles time and time again in other titles, but it functions incredibly well in VR as you can simply tilt your head to see your desired path more clearly.

The second trial puts your detective skills to the test as you're presented with a mound of evidence and must informatively make an all important decision. Here you're thrust into a blackened room where a dinner party of mannequins has ended in cold blood. The responsibility is then on you to listen to alibis, scavenge through emails, and comb through any other evidence to figure out which two guests conspired to the murder. We also felt this section lent itself well to VR, as it added an extra layer of immersion when physically inspecting evidence. We also couldn't escape from a looming sense of doubt when approaching the suspects that we may have made the wrong choice.

Adding a much needed sense of depth to the VR platform, The Assembly is one that instantly drew us in with its intriguing concept and dual protagonist story structure. It's an experience that we felt carried a sense of mystery and discovery throughout and its exploration and puzzle-solving mechanics although familiar, made a smooth transition into the world of VR. The Assembly is set to be released July 19th on PC and in late 2016 on the PS4, and includes flatscreen compatibility for those who have yet to take the plunge. This duality is represented by the control scheme for the game. You can play with a standard controller, although you can also - as with so many other VR games - teleport between locations if walking isn't your thing.

We not only got to play a good chunk of the game, but we were also able to chat with the nDreams team about their ambitious exploration of virtual reality. We spoke with code manager Richard 'Fabs' Fabian, senior designer Jackie Tetley, audio director Matt Simmonds, and comms manager George Kelion.

Gamereactor: What inspired you to create an immersive narrative-driven experience in VR?

Jackie Tetley: For me the first thing I think of when I imagine VR is going to another world. So that's the kind of experience we felt that people would really relish as maybe their first VR experience, which it may be for a lot of people. So we wanted to create a first-person game where you get to explore the environment and take in the marvels around you. Something that allowed people to get used to VR and everything good about it. Once we got the area we were interested in, we're very keen on narrative here at nDreams, so we wanted to make sure it was a really good story and then things kind of just fell out from there. We decided to have two different characters, and setting it in an underground bunker allowed us to make it quirky and mysterious, and we kind of fleshed it out around those goal posts really.

Gamereactor: Throughout the game you are presented with a number of difficult moral choices. Do you think being inside the game's world and playing as these characters allows you to feel emotion on a deeper level?

Jackie Tetley: Yeah I expanded around the term that VR is an emotional amplifier, but it is true, when you put it on it's so different to watching a screen that's remote.

Richard Fabian: You're actually in there and that's why a lot people have been using it as a scare tactic, but we don't do that, we go for a more subtle approach. We're trying to say that this is a reality isn't something you could actually find in the world, but we're as close as realising what happens when you put this reality out there. So we've got the bunker itself, you're going in there, and we started to think about what happens when you have to work in there for a prolonged period of time. So you've got snippets of emails and voicemails going on about 'do they go on holiday' and things that bring it more to life. Because in VR, you're in there and you're hearing these, you think more about the ramifications of things and these tiny elements have more personal reactions.

George Kelion: The one emotion that I think we were trying to amplify more than any other was curiosity.

Richard Fabian: You don't get that as much with your 2D games where you've got the screen borders there and your friend is over there, but in VR where you're in there on your own, you take things more seriously.

Gamereactor: How are both protagonists developed throughout the story?

Jackie Tetley: Both of the characters each have their own arc. Madeline as you've seen, is a newcomer and The Assembly are sort of teasing her and showing off to her, whereas Cal is behind the scenes and you get to explore the life of The Assembly, the real Assembly, through his eyes. They both go through a different journey and you learn more about them, their pasts, and their futures as you go through.

Gamereactor: Do their paths cross later in the story?

George Kelion: They cross paths a minimum of once in the game and it's a very momentous occasion. From the mid-point onwards you are presented with one of several endings and some endings they may or may not meet, and in other endings they also may or may not meet.

Gamereactor: How do you feel the experience differs on a second playthrough?

George Kelion: Sadly, the beginning bits of the game you're just dropped in and you don't know who you are, where you are, or what's necessarily going on, and that can be a little bit jarring. But when you play the game for the second time it really falls into place. Much like Inception, in the first half an hour not much is revealed to you and it doesn't really start to make sense until about halfway through the film. But when you go back a second time it's like "ah okay, I get it." I think there's a parallel there that you can draw between what we do within the opening section of the game.

Jackie Tetley: Also, you hear a lot of things and see a lot of things that don't make sense to you within the context of the first playthrough. You may not remember a little bit of throwaway dialogue that somebody said, but on the second time it's like "ah yeah, that's what that's about," because you've had the experience of playing the game as a whole. So there's a lot of nice signalling going on throughout.

Gamereactor: Do some of the actions you make earlier on in the game also impact the final outcome?

Jackie Tetley: Some of the actions you would have made while undertaking the trials for example, those later thread back to different things and there's also a number of small side stories that have a later impact as well. So there's various things that you'll do where at the time you'll think "okay I'm just doing this thing," and then later you'll think "oh I didn't realise that was going to come back again." Even small things like if you stop to read an email you might get a code to a room that you otherwise wouldn't have gone into, it's not important to the main story, but then you'll learn some more data and it kind of branches out from there. There's lots of things that you can find that don't necessarily hamper your enjoyment if you don't discover it, but also it enhances replayability.

Richard Fabian: You can play through the entire game with this assumption which can be broken right at the beginning and it kind of reinforces what we've been trying to work towards, which is the point that there is no bad guys in this game, there is no evil, there's just different values. So when you figure out that people's motivations are possibly different than expected you may think "ah," this point of view is the important bit, not what happened, but why, and then it's a game of perspectives again.

Gamereactor: There is also a range of puzzles scattered throughout the game, is it possible to fail any of these? And if not, why did you make the decision?

Richard Fabian: No there isn't. It may be some people's first experience of VR so we have to let them complete it to finish the game. Puzzles are in there to cause a choice towards the end of which endings you're going to see, but there's nothing in there that's going to stop you.

Jackie Tetley: There's nothing in there like mission fail. There's the instance of data that you may or may not get, but a lot of it is the context of The Assembly, they're trying you out so they want to see how you do. Sometimes it's not always about the answer or the solution, it's about your path to the solution. How they judge you isn't necessarily based on how you get the answer right, it's about how long did you explore or the approach that you take, and that's reflected in the way that we let players continue on through the game. Same as Madeline as she continues on through the trails, but at the end of it you'll find out what they were really looking at about you and your experience.

Gamereactor: How did you approach sound design in VR?

Matt Simmonds: With VR you have a lot of time in the game where players are actually looking for things, it's not just because of the game style but how people generally engage with VR. The thing with positional audio is that you can really pinpoint stuff, I've used it especially with the above and below things and stuff like that. I made a map of the levels where they actually relate to each other, so in one of the puzzle rooms for example, where there's some big electronic sounds, I made sure you could hear them differently from above and below to add more immersion to the experience.

Gamereactor: Throughout the laboratories that we get to explore through the game there is a number of subtleties added that really adds to the immersion. What was the process of adding these in?

Matt Simmonds: Because of the set-up and because everyone's at the trials, it's given Cal the opportunity to look around people's stuff and figure out what's going on. But it also means, because there are people in the rooms, I wanted it to feel like they had just left. So people have left their screens on and their computers going. But also, because of the operation that it is, you've got experiments that they have left going so that when they get back they will be done, so you can hear the kind of booming sounds of the machines. It was also a kind of psychological thing that Cal isn't supposed to be in these kind of places, so there's always that risk that someone might always appear, so it's good if you kind of get a sense of that from the audio. In the first room when you put your headset on and you're waiting around, there's somebody next door banging on the wall, and you can use stuff like that to make the player feel as if somebody may come into the room.