Music Flows Challenging & Beautiful
Download Size: 42 MB
Time Played: 3 hrs.
Stages Unlocked: 13/15
Manual Dexterity Needed: None
What I'd Pay: $7
Steam Price (3/6/12): $7
Making music with colors is tough, even when you can just convert them by moving the colors over the right spot. Sound abstract? It is. Welcome to one of the most challenging, abstract puzzle games I've played in a while.
Your goal is to create a symphony by filling up meters on the screen with certain colors. Your only source of colors is a stream of particles that are never pointed towards the meters in question. To get them there, you have a few... let's call them fans... to blow them in certain directions. (Ahh, trying to describe the abstract in text...) You can move the fans anywhere on screen, enlarge them, and shrink them until they influence the stream just right. Need a different color? There's color patches that changes any particles passing through it to its color. That's all your tools. Very few, very simple, very maddening.
Many of Auditorium's levels look like you need 1 more fan to solve it than the game provides you. They're solvable, but they require precise placement, overlapping fans, and a few tricks (like splitting a stream by putting the edge of a fan just inside it) to complete. These insidious puzzles are the biggest obstacle to playing the game in one chunk; I often had to quit the game and do something else for several hours just to take another look at a puzzle with fresh eyes.
Luckily, the game's very good at introducing a new fan or mechanic in nearly every stage to keep things fresh. The first level of each stage introduces the new with just a single fan and a single meter, making it very obvious what it does without an actual tutorial. I really appreciated that straightforward demonstration, as the 2nd level usually threw me into the deep end. There's straightforward movement fans, spiral fans that suck in particles, rabbit fans that accelerate particles without changing their direction, reversal fans, reflection fans, even colored fans and black holes. It's amazing how much diversity and complexity they can wring out of this concept.
When you finally manage to complete a level, the whole interface fades away, giving you a view of the stream with the full symphony playing before you advance to the next level. It transforms your maddening, haphazard solution into an eerie scene of beauty, an unusual yet satisfying reward in itself. But all too soon, it's time to work on the next puzzle.
Auditorium does a lot with a little, dividing maddening puzzles and good art & sound design into small chunks. It's a great game to spend a few minutes at a time on while waiting for something else.