Musaic Box

Summary

Musaic Box combines elements of music, puzzle and adventure to create a game that stimulates virtually all of your senses. Is this app a pleasant sensory experience or a bunch of random sounds? Find the answer in our carefully crafted app review.

A mix of music and puzzle? Sounds interesting.

The 10 MB-large Musaic Box comes in six languages including German, English, French, Italian, Spanish and Russian. Coincidently, those are also the languages most operas were ever written in.

After creating a player name, you are redirected to the main menu, decorated with a beautiful clock and divided into the following categories:

• Game
• Options
• Achievements
• Help
• Credits Discussion

Before you get started, it is absolutely essential that you go through the tutorial to figure out how the game works.

At the beginning of the tutorial, you'll find yourself in room with a piece of sheet music that needs to be collected and placed into your book. In order to open the book, you have to click on it and listen to your grandpa’s messages. One more click redirects you to the music player – the main aspect of Musaic box. Inside the music player you’ll a sheet music stand in a golden frame and a music box. The different musical tidbits need to be arranged correctly in order for the song to sound right. In the tutorial all of the pieces of Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King are arranged correctly beforehand to show you how the game works.

Bits and pieces of very famous tunes are hidden all over the room and must be put back together. Once the pieces have been arranged in the right order, the puzzle/song has been successfully completed. To search for fragments of these musical pieces, simply click on objects located around the room at random. Drawers, notebooks and many other things spread across the room contain segments of sheet music. AS you click and tap on everything in the room, you also get educational information about famous composers and their legacies.

Once you’ve collected all the pieces of a song, you can get started with cracking the puzzle. And this is the point where you realize that this game is actually quite challenging. Thankfully, you are not forced to arrange the pieces based on sound along. Each fragment is also labeled with a special colored symbol, with each color representing a specific audio track (i.e. orange for rhythm, pink for the main melody and so on). To solve a puzzle correctly, same colored pieces cannot be located in the same row.

So the main challenge is to arrange the individual sections of the songs and keep same colored pieces from touching. What may appear to be simple in the beginning becomes pretty complex as the game progresses. In some levels, the main melody is missing altogether and you have to solve the level just going by the colors and geometric shapes of the pieces. If you find yourself hopelessly stuck, you can always get a hint by pressing the menu button.

Just as the puzzles themselves become progressively harder, the click and point adventure aspect of the game also becomes more difficult.

Bottom Line:

I really enjoyed the challenging puzzle and the love for famous classical music piece, which creates wonderful combination. Despite the fact that some of the music sounds like MIDI files from the 90s, it’s still a lot of fun and very enjoyable. The attention to detail and the unique game concept make the entire experience very esthetically pleasing. The education element is also wonderful, allowing you to freshen up on music history as you play. From my perspective, it’s a well-rounded game that really sucks you in. Keep in mind that I am saying as someone that easily gets bored from puzzle games.
 

Musaic Box was a pleasure to play on my Nexus One. The room may be a bit larger than the screen, but you can move around by swiping across the screen. There is not pinch and zoom available, but that’s an intentional move to make the game more challenging. All of the objects are very responsive. I must say that the rooms are done with beautiful and detailed graphics. Everything is designed with the uttermost care and precision, including music box and the sheet music.

Nothing serious to report on this front. Didn’t have any issues with Musaic Box as the app performed splendidly the whole time.

Normally, Musaic Box is available for $1.61 from the Google Market, but this week you can download the game at just half the price from our AndroidPIT App Center.