Musaic Box by Big Fish Games

Musaic Box is the stupid fun game from Big Fish Games with the silly ass name. It’s a puzzle game based on the music. The premise of the game is rather dumb, but it’s easily overlooked, as the puzzles themselves are what really make this game great. The plot is something about your grandfather died or is on vacation or something, and left you a birthday present, that you have to solve all these music boxes in order to get. So what you do is you go from room to room, collecting pieces of sheet music or something, and when you collect all the sheets of a particular song, you go to the music box screen and you play it.

Inside the box is where the game really shines. The screen is arranged with the main line at the bottom of the screen, which you can click to hear the song. Then you have puzzle pieces that fit in to the middle of area. The pieces are color coded, with red always being the main line, and the greens, blues, and yellows generally corresponding to to various other instruments, such as the drum line, or whatever else. Now you only want one of each instrument on each line, and the music plays from left to right. Not every instrument is in every line, and as you get farther in the game they start throwing some nasty curve balls at you, like not giving you the main line at all, or making all the pieces the same color.

Once you complete a song you’re rewarded with either a hint about your present, or, usually, another piece of sheet music.

Let’s talk down sides for a second. The game is short, very short. The first time through the game I got about 2/3 of the way done in the free trial hour. It shouldn’t take more than 2-3 hours for anyone to beat this game. The section where you’re browsing around rooms can get old pretty quickly, and some of the pieces of music were pretty much impossible for me to find. If the game didn’t help you out when you start to struggle, I probably would have stopped playing instead of clicking around those damn rooms just trying to find one of those little white squares… but as it is, the hint system makes this bearable. The game definitely has a curve to it. The first couple of rooms are incredibly easy, then it ramps up rather quickly to later levels when I would find myself with 8-10 of single blocks of green and blue and I ended up just throwing them in and using the hint button to see if I happen to get any of them right.

Now all of that aside, the game is still very fun, and when you hit a snag in one of the shitty areas, you can usually use the hint system to get through it quick enough. As I said, it’s short, but the game itself is incredibly cheap. You can pick it up for just 7 bucks and a tiny 69 MB download.

So in the end this is a game for all shapes and sizes, if you enjoy puzzle games, it for sure worth checking out. Go ahead and download the free trial, and if you enjoy what you’re playing, go ahead and buy it. This isn’t a game for everyone, it’s kind of slow, there’s not really a lot to it when you boil it down, just a bunch of variations of the same puzzle, but I enjoyed it.

System Requirements:

* OS: Windows XP/Vista

* CPU: 800 Mhz

* RAM: 256 MB

* DirectX: 8.0

* Hard Drive: 142 MB

[starreviewmulti id=1 tpl=31 element_stars='starscape' average_stars='starscape']

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