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From the Russian makers of Diamond Bird. The girl Alice (the same one from the works of Lewis Carroll), bored, listened to her sister playing the piano - and either fell asleep, or something else, but was suddenly transported to a strange surreal mansion directly associated with a variety of musical works. Which are messed up in the same way as all the local rooms and stairs - wandering through this labyrinth, we have to find and recognize the "encrypted" fragments of melodies, identifying their names and authors by ear. From an external point of view, the game is a first-person adventure game with completely "mouse" controls, panoramic views and discrete movements - almost a real "mystoid"; the mentioned panoramas are implemented on the QuickTime engine, and therefore, alas, they differ more in grain and blur, rather than clarity and colorfulness. Moreover, the actual location image occupies a window of only 400x300 pixels on the screen out of a total of 640x480 pixels - the rest of the space is for some reason reserved for a decorative, but completely useless (except for the interface panel below) frame. To look around, you should move the cursor to any side holding the left mouse button; the Ctrl and Shift keys allow respectively to decrease or increase the field of view. When brought to one of the active points, the pointer changes its appearance. Artistically, the visual part makes a slightly better impression than the technical one. For the professional painter Alexander Schwartz, it was a debut in the field of electronic creativity, however, it brought him first prize at one of the festivals in the "Graphics in computer games" nomination. The world in which we find ourselves resembles such a three-dimensional embodiment of Maurits Escher's fantasies with intertwining planes and stairs; In this atmosphere of insane surrealism, we first of all have to find nine rooms, inhabited by those very confused musical works - and at the same time with various figurines of characters, also very unusual and picturesque. Knights in armor coexist here with dinosaurs, and ladies and gentlemen in Renaissance costumes - with steam locomotives and gramophones. Alexander Rosenblatt later designed the local images into a "musical journey for a symphony orchestra and a reader" and even a whole ballet. The highlight of the sound design lies in the fact that all the melodies are well-known works of the classics changed to some degree of unrecognizability, moreover, they are also combined in a medley with a peculiar arrangement. The result was such a collage quite in the spirit of postmodernism: the composer recalled that, just as Lewis Carroll juggled words and created puns, he himself “turned upside down” several dozen themes of world classics. The encyclopedia built into the game is called upon by clicking on the book icon in the left corner of the lower interface panel. We offer about fifty articles about the personalities of various composers and even musicians, from Scarlatti, Gluck and Bach to Richard Strauss, Duke Ellington and Glen Miller. The texts - unfortunately, written by completely different people on the part of the customer, and not at all by the main developers - are not particularly attractive, often acting as a brief retelling of biographies and various everyday anecdotes. Much more useful is a fragment of one or more works presented on the page of each celebrity - you can listen to it, but it will not last more than a minute, or even a few seconds. However, these are the things you should pay close attention to. We have an extremely original and curious quiz, but intended rather for professors of the conservatory - and they will probably have to scratch their heads more than once, solving local cunning puzzles. |
