Puffin Rock Music‪!‬ 4+

This is the seed for a great little game, and my toddler certainly likes playing with it, but finds it a little frustrating to interact with. The character movements are great and the music is adorable. But so far it is pretty limited, with only two locations and choices of music, not very many ways to have the character voices in the music (currently basically only one at a time based on where they are standing), and there is also very limited ability of the characters to interact with the scene. The recording feature is also a little bit haphazard. With some improvements this will be a great little app!

I’m baffled by the negative reviews for this app. It’s a simple app in terms of features, yes, but it’s still very well designed and perfect for 2-4 year olds that love Puffin Rock and have a strong aptitude for music. The app’s product description accurately describes it - within each of the two scenes, you can create a myriad of sound combinations by moving the 5 characters (as well as tapping on 4 mushrooms or 4 shells) to create a custom version of the song. When I first downloaded it for my 3.5 year old, we walked through it together, object by object, and noticed how each tiny change affected the overall sound. It is so neat and truly captures the unique sounds and individual personalities of the show. My daughter loves it and I have lots of fun with it as well. [Important side note: many reviewers complained about this app having no sound. Turn your volume switch on your iPhone on! This is the setting that determines on/off sound for this app.]

This works on iOS 13 on my iPhone XR just fine, and is an amusing little thing. However, it’s exceptionally limited in that it only has two scenes to select from. From a UX perspective it could also use a little work as it takes about ten seconds to switch between the two different scenes, which is a little excessive.