After your grandfather summons you to his house, you arrive to find it empty, save only for the Musaic Box. That’s all you need to know about the story really. This game is charmingly simple yet deceptive in the challenge provided by this game’s unique take on fusing the puzzle genre with the music genre. The game has you looking through 8 rooms for various clues similar to a mystery game, but not nearly as difficult. Once you find enough clues you can open another puzzle, this is where the game really shines, or rather sings.
The puzzles involve taking various tiles, in Tetris-esque shapes, and organizing them on different board layouts for the many songs in the game. The tiles have symbols with different colors representing different instruments, and different characters to depict the pitch and pattern of the notes played. To complete the board you must organize all the pieces to recreate the brief portion of the song that layout is for. Selections are mostly classical and public domain tunes, such as “Hall of the Mountain King” and others from the Nutcracker, “When the Saint Go Marching In”, “Yankee Doodle”, and more. There isn’t any modern music but in all honesty it would take away from the atmosphere of “grandpa’s house”.
The music has been given some slight tweaks, thanks to an injection of modern music into already well known songs. Hip hop drums, flamenco guitar, or electro keyboards give the songs more tiles to play with, which makes the later puzzles more difficult to piece together. There is also a hint button, which shows you which tiles are already in the right place. There isn’t only one arrangement for the tiles, and the hint button shows you if a certain tile is in the right column, where it fits on that whole column is still up to you, so you can’t just mash at the hint button and let the puzzle solve itself.
There was only one room where looking for clues was frustrating, just one piece in particular, where it seemed like you were clicking on the piece, but in fact needed to click next to where it was in order for it to count as “found”. Other than that the clue finding seems pretty straightforward as they are hidden in plain sight, after long enough, clues have a brief glimmer leading you right to them.
This was an incredibly fun and inventive game with great presentation to a unique idea. After you beat the game you can go back and open a massive board layout to mess around with all the songs you’ve completed, but since you can only choose the tiles from one song at a time this isn’t much fun. If you have a knack for puzzle games, an ear for music, and keen eyesight like me, you’ll be able to beat this game in just under 3 hours.
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