Musaic Box
Developer: KranX Productions
Nominations: Excellence in Audio, Excellence in Design
Platform: Windows (free 60 minute demo, paid full game)
Website
Description: Put together puzzle pieces to create a score for your grandfather’s music box. Find the puzzles throughout your grandfather’s house, unlocking keys that will eventually lead to your birthday gift.

Adam’s Thoughts:
Musaic Box is a game at war with itself. On one side is a novel audiovisual puzzle game, and on the other is a banal adventure game. The puzzle game is a bit like Sudoku–you arrange colored tiles on a grid so that there’s exactly one tile of each color in every column. It’s a bit different because some of the tiles are stuck together, but the task is mostly the same. The thing that makes the puzzles cool is the fact that when you click on a tile, it plays a measure from a common song, like Jingle Bells. If you string enough tiles together into a row, they’ll play the melody and harmonies from an entire refrain. There may be several ways to satisfy the color rule and several ways to string the melody and harmonies together so that they sound good, but there’s only one arrangement of tiles that does both at once and finding that arrangement is the puzzle. Games like Rez may lay claim to synesthesia, but the puzzles in Musaic Box actually scaffold sight with sound.

Unfortunately, before you can try your hand at the puzzles, you have to collect MacGuffins in the adventure game. Nearly every point-and-click sin is on full display here: the clues are obtuse, the solutions arcane, and it can be a hurdle to even tell the difference between the background and interactive objects. The game throws you a bone from time to time by making an interactive object sparkle, but for the most part, you’ll feel like you want to try the next puzzle and the game won’t let you. Still, if you can power through the needless adventure padding, Musaic Box has some fun audiovisual puzzles in its 60 minute demo.

Katie’s Thoughts:
Puzzle games are hard to frame. You can go the Professor Layon route, and put the puzzles within a world. Or you can simply make the game a series of the puzzles. Unfortunately for us, Musaic Box took a really cool series of puzzles and framed them in a tedious adventure game. I don’t hate adventure games as a blanket rule; I loved Monkey Island and am looking forward to Machinarium. But the time you spend between the puzzles in Musaic Box isn’t clever, isn’t charming, but is instead a frustrating exercise in screen scrubbing. To make matters worse, the demo lasts only an hour, so the time you spend checking for pieces of songs takes away from the time you could be playing with the puzzles.

The puzzles themselves are interesting and different; you use the sound of the puzzle pieces to match the score provided by the hidden pieces you hunt down. The score you build has four instruments, while the score you’re provided only has the melody. You need to use some of your mad Tetris skills to fit the pieces together, with a touch of Sudoku to make sure that each instrument plays only one phrase per measure, and plays through each measure. The puzzles are where the excellence lies, and if they cut out the fat, they’ll really have something remarkable.

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Tags:   Excellence in Audio · Excellence in Design · GDC · IGFNo Comments

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