Loom is the first game I’ve played for this project where anything made any sense at all. I see it as a herald of a beautiful new age.
Loom takes place in a world where guilds and magic are everywhere. The world isn’t necessarily totally internally logical, but I’m not going to hold that against the game too much. You play as Bobbin Threadbare, a young member of the Guild of Weavers. Weavers use their staves to perform musical note-based magic spells that can “weave” the fabric of reality.
As fantasy settings go, it’s pleasantly novel. The story is simplistic in the way a story for children is simplistic, but, like, a REALLY GOOD story for children.There’s quite a lot of violence that makes me think this game isn’t actually meant for kids, but who knows, those little psychopaths probably loved it. People getting ripped apart by dragons, birds getting vaporized, all looking really good even with the limited graphical capabilities of the SCUMM engine in the early 90s.
The people being killed don’t hold a candle to some of the backgrounds, though. There’s some really beautiful scenery in Loom.
Loom’s gameplay is quite different from that in other adventure games. It avoids feeling arbitrary and frustrating, but it still accesses once or twice that satisfying part of the brain that activates when you solve a puzzle. In this game, all puzzles are solved by playing sequences of four notes. There are no items and no dialogue trees. All you're doing is thinking about the situation around your character, deciding which of your many powers is best suited to it, and then making shit happen. It’s completely linear, and it’s never confusing about where you should be. Yet still, there are a couple moments where you have to think a little bit, and those are cool. There’s one part with a maze right in the middle of the game that’s taking the score down an entire star from where it would be without the maze. There was a maze in Last Crusade, too, which makes me think some con artist was for whatever reason trying to convince LucasArts at the time that people love mazes. We don’t.
Astute readers will notice that only once or twice do puzzles really come together in Loom; that’s because the game is short (About two hours), but also because most of the puzzles are solved basically by the game telling you what to do. I’m looking ideally for a mid-ground here, but if an adventure game is going to be either too easy and interesting or too hard and boring, I’m going to go for the former. Same for the length; especially with a game like this, where you can obtain it at such a low level of commitment, a short-but-sweet experience is preferable to one being dragged out.
There are compelling reasons to play Loom. The story is surprisingly strong, the art is wonderful, the voice acting is quite good, and the puzzles are reasonable and present. The maze part is awful, and the story ends really abruptly in a way that leaves no ambiguity about Loom being the first installment in a never-completed trilogy, but it’s the best game I’ve played so far in my backlog project. Three stars.