Auditorium starts out as this black screen in front of you. It gives you no instructions on what to do or any hints at all. In fact one of the big foundations the game was built upon was discovery. The game evokes a sense of discovery in people.
In fact writing about it makes me feel guilty that I might spoil some sense of perhaps your discovery of the beauty of this game. In its essence the game is a puzzle game.
You have these circles with arrows on them. Another outer layer around this circle that you can expand. You can move the circles around. There is a stream of white line and something that looks like a volume control.
If you move the circle and play around a bit, you will get the idea. The aim is to make the stream touch the volume control. That will play a music and you need to keep the stream on the volume control until it fills up and you complete the stage. Obviously the circle manipulates the stream based on the direction the arrow on the circle is pointing.
The outer circular thing will modify the direction of the stream more significantly. It really is important to get a feel of how these controls work for it to all make sense. Th cool thing is that the volume control thing actually resonates a sound from one musical instrument. It may be violin, synth, piano, bass etc. As you pass the first level, you will find that the game starts to include more than one volume control. As you direct the stream over these volume control, you get an enchanting piece of music that works together...much like a symphony.
While you might think that the puzzles are easy, the difficulty level ramps up quite a bit later on. What i found really interesting is that the whole dynamic of the volume controls acting like a piece in a symphony was a natural reward to solving the puzzle.
Often times i listened in amazement the amount of diversity in the different musical pieces stringing the piece together. At each level you will often wonder, can the music get more complex with many more pieces, to which you will discover that it can.
On one level, it is mesmerising. The very simplistic aesthetic belie the actual beauty of the animating stream playing the symphony like something that can only be compared to a graceful figure skater, skating over the ice rink. The audio visual experience just wont stop amazing you as you graduate to another level.
To put it shortly, this 'game' is more about experience. It is more of an experience rather than a game. The way it rewards player unconsciously with music is a very fresh idea a kin to something like flower or flow. Like all experiences, it is hard to describe. It really has to be experienced to be understood.
This is however just a demo, but what a demo it was. Auditorium will be one of the games I will be following very closely. Another indictment of how awesome indy games can be. You ought to give it a try and experience its magic.
Link : http://www.playauditorium.com/
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