"LOOM"

When I was a kid, my dad "borrowed" and never gave back (i.e. stole) a CD of LucasArts games from his work, a disc for Macintosh computer featuring The Secret of Monkey Island, Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade, and, if I recall correctly, Pipe Dream. The first of these would go on to be one of my favourite games of all time (bested only by its own sequel). But another game on that disc was LOOM.

These days I think of myself as someone who knows LucasArts adventure games, but the truth is the games I really know are The Monkey Island series, and the other ones I've played and finished are the two Indiana Jones games (Last Crusade and Fate of Atlantis), Day of the Tentacle, Sam & Max Hit the Road, and Grim Fandango. I've played a bit of, but never finished, Maniac Mansion and Zac McKracken, I don't think I've ever played The Dig, and the one time I tried to play the full version of Full Throttle its unintuitive (in my view) puzzles annoyed me so much that I stopped. But I always forget about LOOM.

I definitely played LOOM as a kid, albeit without the copy protection information allowing the player to leave the opening island, and saw m'colleague playing the rest of it later in my youth, but I'd never played the full thing until this last week in which I decided to sit down and experience the full adventure of Bobbin Threadbare of the Guild of Weavers. The game has a point-and-click interface in which Bobbin must use his magical distaff to interact with objects in the world by playing various "drafts", i.e. magic spells. There are no dialogue trees and there's no inventory.

The two things people generally say about LOOM is that it's easy and it's short. I'm not entirely sure of the first part — as with all LucasArts adventure games I feel like some puzzle solutions suffered from not clearly indicating that it was even possible to try certain actions, let alone accomplish them. The second part I definitely agree with. The game feels as if it has only just established its world and cast of characters when it rushes to its dénouement. Maybe it was because I was only familiar with the first section, but the opening Loom Island portion of the game, in which you are introduced to the distaff mechanic, I always assumed was a mere prologue to a much larger experience, but it isn't really. After you escape from Loom Island, the game only has one other "open" section, Crystalgard, which really only features a single puzzle, and it then becomes more or less a linear sequence of set pieces until the end.

So LOOM feels a little bit underdone, especially compared to the LucasArts games which came out around it, namely Indy 3 and Monkey 1. We don't get to spend much time with any characters, and the plot moves extremely quickly. The whole thing almost feels more like a proof-of-concept for a larger experience that never came to fruition, and I suppose given that it was designed with the idea of two sequels which were never developed this makes sense, but again the linearity of the second half of the game emphasises a sense of unfulfilled potential, in which there could have been much more room for experimentation.

Like all LucasArts games, one thing LOOM does well is atmosphere. Partly this is due to its Tchaikovsky-derived soundtrack and early-90s LucasArts' ever-pleasant pixel visuals. However, it's also enhanced by the world that it imagines. LOOM's world is truly fantasy, with much magic and no visible modern technology, but it doesn't just present itself as a pseudo-medieval pastiche; there are no kings, knights or bedraggled peasants, just guilds of different artisans who all use magic in their own unique ways: shepherds who render themselves invisible to stealthily guard their flocks, blacksmiths who craft weapons of exceptional quality, clerics who dabble in necromancy, glassmakers who make scrying spheres, and the weavers, who warp the very fabric of reality itself. The guilds have distinctive outfits, unique visual styles and appropriate names. Thus the game presents itself with a fantasy world which truly feels "fantastic", a world of high magic and possibility, not just medieval Europe with wizards. One thing I especially appreciate is that the game does not use invented languages or similar, instead creating names from suitable arrangements of English words.

Of course, in some respects, this refreshing potential only makes LOOM's short and simple nature feel more unsatisfying. However, I'm immediately intrigued by the bits of story we hear about the past; when did the Age of the Great Guilds come into being, and how? What were the First and Second Shadows that seem to have threatened the world previously? Maybe this is revealed in the audio drama which accompanied the game's EGA graphics release (I've listened and it doesn't add much), but it creates a sense of wonder, of a world we can both understand (the professions are relatable, albeit magical), and speculate about regarding its broader story. Perhaps it's a shame that there were never any sequels to LOOM, but equally perhaps there's no harm in it being left to fire a player's imagination thirty years later. That's also something to say in favour of the LucasArts adventures; unlike some games of their era, they're still actually playable without immense frustration. And perhaps with the benefit of hindsight we can interpret LOOM less as a sprawling puzzle game in the vein of Monkey Island or Myst, and more as an early graphics-driven example of a visual novel or interactive storytelling with a puzzle element, which of course has only become more and more common as game development tools have become more accessible.

With that in mind, then, I think LOOM is worth thinking about in two ways: firstly, it's a taste of what was to come in player-driven audio-visual experiences. Secondly, and strikingly, however, it's a good example of what fantasy could be and, in my experience, still rarely is: something truly distinctive and imaginative, while simultaneously having a grounded narrative. Imagine what could be made with today's tools yet with the simple, but powerful, spellbinding of LOOM? And thirty years later it feels like it's still waiting to be the creative inspiration it deserves to be.