To an outside observer, Auditorium HD looks like an interactive screensaver, an explosion of light and color that serves to dazzle the senses. To the player, it's a surprisingly deep puzzler, one where you're tasked with manipulating streams of light so that they touch specific boxes on the screen. When the light hits the designated areas, a portion of a song begins to play. If you're on a later stage, where you likely have several places the light needs to go, you can expect each box to correspond to an instrument in the song, forcing you to activate them all to hear the song with its full instrumentation. Of course the levels get increasingly complex as you go through the numerous stages, with new tools introduced slowly to make sure things don't get too repetitious.
Auditorium HD doesn't start with a lengthy tutorial. Instead, you're just dropped immediately into the game, given some tools, and challenged to figure out what to do. Not that it's hard to determine if you're doing something right, though, as the audio cues are vibrant and gratifying, compelling me to keep doing what I'm doing.
The tools are fun to use not because they're unlike anything I've seen before, but because they're so intuitive to use. All the tools are represented as circles, which you can enlarge to make them affect a larger portion of the screen. Instead of beating you over the head with a bunch of video or audio instructions, each tool is introduced one at a time with a simple level that teaches you by doing. All the tools make sense within seconds of using them, allowing you to do things like bend light in a specific direction, reverse the flow of light, speed up the flow, or even change the color of the beams. These tools also work differently when overlapped, adding strategy and depth to the later levels.
The challenge -- and delight -- comes from the way Auditorium HD mixes these tools together. Some levels will task you with directing light all over the stage while also changing it to several different colors. How you do this is really up to you and may require a lot of experimentation. Most stages have several solutions, and while a good portion of the pleasure in Auditorium HD comes from divining a solution, the journey to that moment is also great. Every level culminates in an epiphany, a point where the child-like sensibilities we often suppress as adults come out, and we just enjoy the pure spectacle of how we're affecting the environment. Watching the light bend, swirl and activate portions of the music is surprisingly enthralling, making every stage a visual playground.
While you can play Auditorium HD with a Dual Shock or SixAxis, it functions really well with a PlayStation Move controller. Shifting the tools around is super easy and much faster with the Move, enabling you to use them in ways that are simply not possible with the SixAxis. You can essentially swing the tools around on the screen, moving the light around so rapidly that you can solve several levels with hardly any of the other tools. Sure, it kind of feels like cheating at times, but it also makes you feel like a conductor, directing the music and light to its culmination.
