Musaic Box

Musaic Box is a combination of everything I like. It is a musical 'toy' that plays delightful tunes while at the same time challenges your mind with it's hidden-object cum brain teaser game style.

The story; You are the faceless hero that discovers a mystical 'musaic' box along with a note telling you to seek and piece musical compositions together to be played with the object during a visit to your grandpa's place. Hence, you have to scour through the house's many rooms - attic, basement, study, etc - for pieces of musical outlines. Not all the pieces are obvious to the eye though, you might need to overturn some items or maybe assemble machines along the way.

All's not done yet even upon completion of a piece of composition. Next, you'll attempt to arrange Tetris-like colored blocks on a grid so that they fit while at the same time arranged in such a way that the entire tune is pieced together. To make things easier, most of the time there'll be a player that plays a basic tune to give you an idea how the overall composition is gonna sound like. Interestingly there are four musicians (with different instruments) at each corner of the screen that corresponds to a color. Each column on the grid must then only contain one of each color since 1 musician can only play to one thing at a time. While arranging, you can listen to snippets of the songs over and over just to make sure you are on the right track.

Basic tune of Mozart's Symphony 40 in G Minor

When you have finally put everything in the correct spots, you'll get to enjoy the entire tune in all its mini-orchestra splendor which is really, really pleasant to the ears. Definitely not just a case of playing the right tune but playing the tune right!

To sum it up, I love the game..music games will definitely strike a chord with me going forward :D The reward in the form easy-on-the-ear tunes is very much satisfying. The variety of songs used are also enjoyable (except the Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star sounded a bit weird to me), featuring classical music from the likes of Mozart, Handel to famous folk songs (Mary Had A Little Lamb, Old McDonald, ..), waltz, carols and many more.

The downside, well, the game is a tad too short and has little replay value although you do unlock a "Create your own tune" feature which allows you to do just that. (Too bad composing tunes are not really my thing). Despite all that, Musaic Box will definitely provide you with several days, if not hours of musical fun. Perhaps I'll revisit it again once every few years :P

Basic Tune of Mary Had A Little Lamb

My Rating: