I have a love-hate relationship with games that are also toys. I'm talking about games like Townscaper, The Ramp, Summerhouse, and even Tiny Glade. These games are essentially one infinite creative mode where your goal is simply to “make something” to your heart's content. I love the content in those games, and I admire and drool until the cows come home the lovely GIFs and clips that people far more imaginative than I am churn out from them. But without an overarching purpose that shapes what I get to make, I struggle to get any personal pleasure out of them. This is a chronic “blank slate syndrome,” but the joy of Oddada's Musical Toy Box is not.
Oddada's Steam Next Fest demo gives you something to really grab hold of, though it might not seem that way on first try. Right off the bat, you're asked to poke and prod various music boxes to make them produce amusing sounds. First, you insert the letters of the game's own name into an adjustable wooden tower carved with an adorable little face. The height determines what pitch it'll immediately start humming at. Then a toy train appears on the scene, allowing you to change the scenery from day to night to twilight, which further changes the timbre of the sounds. Pressing the big red button at the end of the train takes you to another scene where you can build on the dadadams you've created, or mute it completely to make something new.
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There are several such scenes, each more tactile and intriguing than the last, with overlapping musical soundscapes as you progress. My favourite is the one with the sleepy eye pattern. Cron They chime little bells together, and by moving their open, toothy mouths up and down they can vary the speed of their eye contact and the sound of the bells. The toy wooden pipe organ is also quite intricate, notching multi-coloured drums with each click of the keys with the mouse, adding a more rhythmic, percussive knock, buzz and ding to my growing bed of electronic music. If you need to start over the rhythm you've just laid out, just slam the metal handle on the side and start over.
This is really fun, and the best part is that each added layer is represented as another little car on the toy train, which can be moved up and down again to adjust the volume or turned off completely in the wider composition you've created. Once the six little wheeled trucks follow behind, it's time for the grand finale – the recording session. The faux orchestra tunes up, the curtain of cassette tapes peels back, and the train is standing front and center on a track with rolling hills and a giant toy sun hanging from a tiny pull string. With the timer on the train engine ticking, you have 50 seconds or so to freely tinker with your composition, turning up the volume of each layer like a teddy bear picnic DJ.
The problem was, I expected it to all end there, that I would see the “Thank you for playing” screen and that this entire fascinating experience would end. I started to get into that stage I always do with toy box games, thinking, “Oh well, that was a fun 10 minutes, but I don't think I need any more of this.” Sure, I had a lot of fun customizing the look of my cassette tapes, naming and labeling them and decorating them with stickers, but I was prepared to toss them in the nearest cassette box, seal them up, trapped forever in the game, probably never to be seen or heard from again.
But there was one more station my train could stop at. It was a little yellow plastic computer with a conveniently shaped tape tray sticking out of it. Because this is a game that celebrates curiosity and poking around to see what happens, I quickly inserted a tape. And the screen (and a new, unfamiliar lever) sprang to life. A tape icon appeared next to an arrow pointing to a folder, and I was thrilled. I was asked if I wanted to save the song as a WAV file to my PC, and in that moment I knew I had finally found my motivation and purpose: to use Oddada to make cool little WAV files that I could play myself, on my own time. For some reason, this felt more fulfilling to me than a screenshot folder full of lovely summer houses and Tiny Glade scenery. But this game lit up nodes in my brain like no other toy box game I'd ever encountered, and so I let out a big cry of admiration for Oddada.
