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“Maestro a terrible night has begun! The Queen of the Night has stolen the Sun. Your music will break the Queen’s wicked spell and once again the world will be well.”

Players are challenged to solve musical puzzles to reach the castle of the evil Queen of the Night and bring daylight back to the world in this engaging and imaginative program. Although activities revolve primarily around identifying musical instruments used in pieces from Mozart’s famous opera, The Magic Flute, games also include musical trivia and re-creating musical notes with an onscreen vibraphone.

Mozart's Magic Flute The Music Game is a great supplement for a musically inclined child or the serious music student. Adults and children with little or no musical background will be surprised at the challenge of stopping to truly listen to a piece of classical music, dissect it, and put it back together again. The program's publisher dubs the games “musical jigsaw puzzles,” and they truly are puzzles to piece together using your ears rather than your eyes.

Players move through an interactive park in order to reach a castle through completing activities, which become increasingly difficult. However, there are some places in the program where players choose the sequence of activities. Since some of these puzzles are much more difficult than others, this makes learning more challenging.

The Magic Flute teaches not only musical skills, but also history. When the player collects a feather on the quest path, a narrated slideshow with an antecdote about Mozart's life appears. The program also simplifies the plot of this complex and confusing opera so that even the youngest players will develop a greater understading of the story and genre.

The quest or challenge premise of The Magic Flute is appealing to older children. Kids liked winning the individual games and collecting rewards to place in their “magic bags.”

The Magic Flute installs very easily and quickly. The program navigation is intuitive, so even the youngest players could make their way through the park by clicking on obvious landmarks. One game was confusing in the oral instructions, and it took several tries to decipher how to point and click to choose the correct answer.

The Magic Flute is best for use at home. Although the program remembers where the first user left off, there is no way to save multiple player’s sessions—not ideal for use in the classroom or in families with more than one child.

The program is geared toward ages 4 and up. However, younger children and pre-readers will find the higher level games difficult without an adult to help them navigate through the sometimes vague instructions.

This is a fun and very unique program to add to your child’s library of educational software.

See SuperKids' comparisons with other music software titles, and the Buyers Guide for current market prices of this Windows-only program.

PC: Windows 98 or later, Pentium 360MHz or faster cpu, 250 MB hard drive space, 64 MB RAM .

Reviewed on:
-     Pentium III - 750 running Windows 2000, with 192MB RAM and 24x - CD-ROM

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