The Collection Chamber: ALICE IN MUSIC LAND

Alice in Musical Land
(Interactive adventure with educational elements)

In the world you find yourself in, someone has mixed up all the musical pieces. The only thing left intact was an old music encyclopedia and short surviving pieces of music.

Wandering through a fantastic 3D building, you have to find 9 rooms in which you will hear strange music. In each fragment the sounds and melodies of famous composers are changed (sometimes beyond recognition). Your task is to guess which melodies and which composers were played.

The interactive music encyclopedia, always at your fingertips, contains all the information you need to solve the riddle. All you need to do is read and listen carefully - especially listen, as some of the small musical fragments you'll find in the encyclopedia are the clues.

The characters in the rooms are also not random. All of them can guide you to the correct answer.

"Alice in Music Land" is the best way to learn about the history of music in a playful way.

~ badly translated from the back of the Russian box

Alice in Music Land (also known as Alice in a Musical Country as it has sometimes been translated as) is one of those mid-90s PC obscurities that feels like it could've been conceived in an alternative world through a looking glass. Released in 1996 for Windows 3.1 by the Russian publisher So\USE Interactive Entertainment, it was produced in a very small print run (manufactured in Sweden, of all places) and quietly slipped out of sight on its way to the English speaking world. Despite its obscurity, it later found its way onto Russia's official list of recommended educational music software, leading schools, libraries, and even kindergartens to acquire it. The game supports both Russian and English, further underscoring its unusual international ambitions for the time.

The premise borrows loosely from Lewis Carroll's classic stories; a bored girl named Alice drifts into a surreal mansion connected to music. The story barely exists beyond a couple of introductory text screens, but it serves as a framing device for the real objective - wandering through a maze of rooms to identify encrypted fragments of classical music by ear. Developed by the small team known as Rongo-Rongo (programmer Alexei Morozov, artist Alexander Schwartz, and composer Alexander Rosenblatt make up the entire team), the game is essentially a first-person, mouse-driven adventure in the Myst mold, complete with discrete movement and panoramic views rendered using QuickTime.

The paintings on the walls will provide information about the many featured composers.

They're a must read if you want to solve the music puzzles. Be careful: you are timed!

Technically, the presentation shows its age even by standards of the time. The panoramas are grainy and slightly blurred, displayed in a modest 400×300 window within a 640×480 screen and surrounded by a largely decorative frame. Navigation is entirely mouse-based, with the cursor changing shape to indicate movement or interaction, and keyboard modifiers allowing the player to adjust the field of view. While the visuals lack sharpness, the controls are clear and functional, making exploration straightforward once you acclimate to the interface.

Artistically, however, Alice in Music Land is far more memorable. The mansion resembles a three-dimensional Escher drawing brought to life complete with impossible staircases, interwoven planes, and dreamlike rooms are populated by an eclectic mix of bizarre figures. We have armored knights cavorting with dinosaurs while Renaissance nobles gather around a gramophone as they mingle amongst steam locomotives. Each scene is presented in a painterly, surreal and very memorable collage. If you can look past the pixilation inherent to the technology, there's a great deal to admire in its atmosphere and visual imagination.

The 9 secret rooms all contain remixed music and visual collages from which to decipher the composer.

Click on the book to enter the encyclopedia, the gramophone to play the music, and the cat to make a guess.

The heart of the game, naturally, is its music. The score doesn't just accompany the visuals, it is the crux of the gameplay. Each room contains medleys that splice together fragments of famous works, sometimes blending up to six pieces into a single composition. Verdi might segue into Wagner, Khachaturian into Liszt, all re-contextualized through playful, postmodern arrangements. Composer Alexander Rosenblatt later reworked this material into concert pieces and even a ballet, a testament to how strong and self-sufficient the music is outside the game itself. Using these compositions, and the visual clues in the collages, you must correctly guess the composer by clicking on the Cheshire Cat symbol at the bottom of the screen.

To help players untangle these musical riddles, the game includes an in-game encyclopedia with around fifty short articles on composers ranging from Bach and Gluck to Duke Ellington and Glenn Miller. The writing is dry and occasionally flawed, but each entry includes an audio excerpt that's far more useful than the text. Progress hinges on correctly identifying 34 hidden melodies, matching composers and works from long lists. This is an exhausting an unforgiving task, since 50 wrong guesses will end the game outright. Good luck to tone deaf players, but even if you aren't the occasional mislabeled entries and at least one missing piece of information makes the challenge brutal no matter your skill level. The result is an extraordinarily original educational quiz that feels tailor made for university professors rather than schoolchildren. Flawed yet fascinating, Alice in Music Land remains a unique game that lovers of classical music and curious collectors of rare, experimental PC games are sure to lap up. If you don't fit into either of those camps, avoid.

To download the game, follow the link below. This custom installer exclusive to The Collection Chamber uses DOSBox running Microsoft Windows 3.1 to get the game working on modern systems. Read the ChamberNotes.txt for more detailed information. Tested on Windows 10.

File Size: 145 Mb. Install Size: 259 Mb. Need help? Consult the Collection Chamber FAQ

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