Musaic Box is a new music/puzzle/point and click game from Badim at Newgrounds. The concept is quite refreshing for music games. Essentially, you are building music square by square in a music box.

Your grandfather has left you clues all over his house that will lead you to your birthday present. He’s a great musician and it becomes your job to piece his music back together. Some is written on scraps of paper, while other parts are hidden in paintings, projections from lampshades, and in his precious instrument collection. Once you get the sheet music copied down, you have to arrange the song to fit in the music box.

The song is completed in Musaic Box.

The point and click element leaves a lot to be desired. There’s a lot of text for some objects and absolutely nothing for others. The only way to know if you’re clicking on something that can be interacted with is if text pops up or music is revealed. It’s an annoyance that detracts from the gameplay elements that make Musaic Box worth playing.

The joy of Musaic Box is the music puzzles. The songs are arranged in three to four different parts that can only fit together in one correct sequence. There are visual cues–verging on Gregorian chant notation–that can help you put the song together melodically. There’s also a simple rule that must be followed. Each column can only feature one of each musical color.

It becomes a matter of trial and error. The reddish-pink color is always the melody. When you click on the pieces, they play whatever part of the arrangement they represent. Will you try to line up the melody pieces before putting them in the box? Try different combinations of puzzle pieces based on the shape of the box? Abuse the hint system that only tells you if the pieces are in the right musical order, not whether they’re in their appropriate puzzle slot? Or some combination of the above? There is no right way to play and some puzzles can be stacked together in different ways and still be correct.

The songs are all public domain numbers, like “Aloha ‘Oe” or “In the Hall of the Mountain King.” However, the arrangements are quite clever. “Alouette” becomes a bouncy cartoon anthem filled with interesting counter point. “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean” becomes a fast rock track with screeching guitars. The further you go in the game, the more elaborate and inventive the arrangements become.

You don’t need to be a trained musician to have fun with this game. It’s very user friendly and rewarding. Aside from the random nature of the point and click elements, it just makes sense. Grit your teeth and get through the exploration of the rooms to have fun building music piece by piece.

For doing something new and interesting, Musaic Box joins the ever-growing recommendation of online games called Play It.

Thoughts? Love to hear them.

ClickShake Games have done it again. In a new sequel to their game The Visitor, they have completely changed the gameplay mechanics to keep a novel little title fresh and interesting.

In The Visitor games, you play as a pink parasite from outer space. You are driven by hunger and eat every living creature you come across. However, to tackle critters much larger than you, you have to have the right abilities. Good thing you absorb the characteristic traits of any creature you eat and grow in size with each feeding.

Using a variety of clickable objects, you must consume the raccoon in The Visitor Returns 2011.

In a welcome change from the looser overhead adventure game format, The Visitor Returns 2011 transitions into a point-and-click puzzle game. You need to figure out the correct sequence of actions to get the upper hand. Otherwise, you will be destroyed instantly.

The puzzles are clever. Only the first stage (pictured above) relies on a blink and you’ll miss it bit of interactivity. The rest of the game does not overstay its welcome. In five scenarios, you reach the credits. The final stage has six possible solutions sure to please any gore fan. Better than that, the visitor actually retains all of his abilities in this game. You’ll need them in the final stage.

I’ll gladly add The Visitor Returns 2011 to the Play It series at Sketchy Details. It’s short, it’s clever, and it’s fun. You can get to the game at Newgrounds.

On this edition of Play It, we look at a novel spin on a well-worn physics puzzle engine.

Words and Physics is a new online puzzle game from Turbo Nuke/keyboi available at Newgrounds. The objective is obvious to online puzzle fans: knock the target object off it’s platform by any means necessary. How Words and Physics is in the conceit of the game itself: it’s text-based puzzles.

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Sometimes, a video game succeeds in spite of its flaws. On this edition of Play It, we’ll take look at an art game that works so well thematically that it succeeds in its author’s intent.

Love’s Cadence is an online platformer/art game from Red Harvest. You play as Cadence, a young woman, pursuing Dirk, the man she loves. She’ll climb over mountains, jump through pits, and follows any lead she can for her feelings. Her heart is her guide and no amount of logical thinking or warning will stop her.

The first thing that sets Love’s Cadence apart from other art games is the platforming element. This isn’t a WASD/arrow keys control scheme just thrown in to be called a game. Actually negotiating platforms and puzzles is integral to the story. Life or death is the greatest stake in the game and being able to fail repeatedly to reach that ideal life only helps the narrative of the game. The controls are not as precise as they should be, but neither is any ideal romance. There will be problems and being able to miss something important because of a minor slip-up only enhances that.

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Lab of the Dead is an online zombie simulation/mystery game. You play as scientist Allen C. Tyler, a man who wound up in an underground military complex shortly before the zombie apocalypse escalated to nuclear destruction. He has tasked himself with discovering the cause and cure for transformation into a zombie.

The gameplay is strictly point and click. You have a series of items at your disposal to hand over, feed, or attack your zombie subject with. Your job is to quantify the reactions and alter the subject’s mood, hunger, and humanity to elicit different results. You also have to research upgrades to your facilities, new objects to test, new research methodologies, and what happened to the previous scientist examining the zombies.

As repetitive as the gameplay is, there is something compelling about this grotesque simulation game from Evil-Dog at Newgrounds. (warning: image of deteriorating zombie after the break)

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I like a good tower defense game. One of the better ones I’ve encountered in a few weeks is Candystand’s Cursed Treasure. It is not a particularly innovative tower defense game, but it’s so well made that it becomes a must play game for fans of this genre.

In a narrative twist (not a novel one, but a rare one), you are playing as the bad guy. You must defend your five precious jewels from the hoards of heroes trying to earn fame. You build temples (flames), crypts (heat seeking projectiles), and dens (arrows) on varied terrain to destroy the heroes before they touch your gems. Lose all five gems and you’ve failed the level.

Unlike traditional tower defense games, Cursed Treasure is broken into different levels. Each level has multiple waves of enemies. Your goal is to build up experience to upgrade your buildings and spells to better deal with the increased difficulty curve. This could be upgrading the speed of the weapon, magical properties of the weapon, strength of a spell, or penalties for heroes who get too close to the gems. The game is balanced enough that even doing the minimum upgrade on a certain element is enough to make a noticeable difference. You’ll reach a point where if you don’t upgrade, you can’t progress any further. The stages are incidental to the need to constantly improve your arsenal

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You are a warrior. You’re about to have your lunch outside when a giant bird steals it. This is unacceptable. You require revenge. And you will get it with a sword, a grappling hook, and a seemingly unending field of Titans*.

Titan Launch Retaliation is a new game from Berzerk Studio on Adult Swim’s website. This takes the launch the [animal] games to a whole new level of absurdity. Instead of shooting a turtle out of a cannon or a frog in a rocket ship, you are jumping off the edge of a cliff and stabbing your way through the air. Every creature you kill gives you a boost of energy to jump further until you hit a more complicated boss. Those require multiple hits to kill. Your ultimate goal is to get back your lunch.

The controls are simple even if the game is difficult due to random generation of monsters. All you need is the mouse and the space bar to navigate the menus. In the game itself, you just need the space bar or the left mouse button. This launches you off the cliff, shoots your grappling hook into smaller enemies, and slays the larger beasts.

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Wonderputt is a unique online mini golf game from DampGnat at Newgrounds.com. If you’re thinking “How can a mini golf game be unique at this point?,” you have a right to your skepticism. For years, the only major change in most golf games worth trying was the style of course. You’d still drag back with the mouse to power up and aim the club and let go to hit. You’d deal with either an overhead 2D or angled 3D perspective. It felt like the same game over and over.

Wonderputt has a big novelty factor going for it that I haven’t seen before. The entire course is on the screen from the first hole. You just don’t know it yet. Every time you sink that last putt, the environment moves to create the next hole. One minute, your golfing in a pasture a group of cattle just ate through. The next minute, a cloud arrives to fill the screen with snow, transporting you to ski slopes. It’s refreshing enough to make this mini golf game a must play.

The game is clean and graphic. The controls are responsive and the music and sound enhance the experience. The cut-scenes to produce the next course are clever and often unexpected. Even the difficult ramps up in unexpected ways. It’s not that the course becomes progressively more challenging. It’s that the challenge is constantly shifting in ways that change your playing strategy. Even turning one hole into a near-mirror image of the previous hole is enough to keep the game interesting.

Vampire Vision from Center for Game Science is a fun and challenging spot the difference game. You are a vampire hunter. Your job is to use the clues given to you during a tarot reading to rid a village location of vampires. The cards might reveal that vampires will have red eyes or run in the dark. You then take a field-wide view to point out who the vampires are, stake them through the heart, and save the village.

The goal of the game is to be a sort of vision training exercise. You working on the ability to follow multiple objects at the same time and make quick distinctions between them. Hidden behind the novel vampire hunting/shifting attributes theme does wonders to make it fun.

There is no experience curve as you could randomly be placed in the hardest style of recognition for you after the initial training stage. Maybe you do great identifying which vampires are dressed different, but struggle to tell which vampires can move quickly at night. The game makes it challenging enough to feel like you should invest your time, but simple enough to progress that anyone could take a stab at the game.

For a fun time-waster with some good novel concepts, you should try playing Vampire Vision.