Musaic Box is an interesting take on music games and a small shout out to independant game studios that all kinds of weird and wonderful concepts can work.
The Premise
Musaic Box is a puzzle/music game hybrid where you must piece together blocks of music to form a whole track of many music boxes that your grandfather has scattered around your house.
The Gameplay
Essentially each level has 3 or 4 instruments and there is an outline that all the instrument coloured blocks must be placed into. The blocks all come in different shapes and sizes and one block is one single bar from a song per instrument. You place them into an exact position and then hopefully complete the song. Sometimes its a matter of playing jigsaw, others its about listening back to what you’ve already placed to make sure its all in tune. In order to find the levels, you play a bit of item searching on static screens of rooms to find the outlines. Sometimes moving items is needed later on but that’s about it. Once you’ve completed the game, you are then able to rearrange the songs how you like brick wise, as long as you always keep to the Musaic Box rule that you can only have your instrument playing one bar at one time. It’s not as deep as it would like to be, but it is a nice fun addition to what is a fairly quick game.
The Graphics
Nothing too dramatic to write home about, its all very functionally but I do like how when an instrument plays, one of the four corner windows opens to show a little camtoy man playing it.
The Sound
Obviously sound is key to this game and sound in the most part is great. All the songs are either classical classics, nursery rhymes or songs everyone knows. They’ve almost all been rearranged to a degree but still keep the main tune intact.
The RePlay Factor
The actual main game is pretty short and can be done in a few hours easily once you know what you’re doing. The tutorial should see you through though. The after play factor is down to how much you want to tinker with the songs and samples after. I didn;t get too inspired myself being a musican anyway, but its a good start for people just wanting to lightly tinker with things.
The Positives
~New concept
~Sense of achievement when you complete a song makes the game rewarding
The Negatives
~Not as deep as you’d think it is
Conclusion
Musaic Box is a fun distraction for a few hours but not a game you’d constantly want to return to. There’s plenty of fun to be had but its not quite enough puzzling, nor enough of a music game to completely satisfy either fan base and therefore sits uncomfortably in the middle at times. However, if you know its going to be a lighthearted bit of fun and that you don’t mind reconstructing Old McDonald, then I recommend it as a left-feild game of choice for a quick 20 minutes quiet time.