"The Excavation of Hob's Barrow"

Full spoilers for The Excavation of Hob's Barrow within.

 

For some reason it's taken me a while to warm up to the idea of playing adventure games made in Adventure Game Studio (AGS). I don't really have a good justification for that beyond perhaps having played Yahtzee Croshaw's Chzo Mythos games too many times as a kid and not being terribly interested in the urban fantasy or cyberpunk genres, which seem to be a recurrent setting for a lot of commercially released AGS games such as those developed and/or published by Wadjet Eye Games. Regardless, the itch to play some more point and click adventures struck me this year and on recommendation I initially played Clifftop Games' Kathy Rain, followed by Wadjet Eye's Shardlight and, most recently, Cloak and Dagger Games' The Excavation of Hob's Barrow (published by Wadjet Eye), and while none of these games are quite the sprawling puzzle-driven experience of, say, a classic LucasArts title, they've all shared strong atmosphere and decent if not always massively original approaches to story and characters.

I was actually reminded of the approach of The Excavation of Hob's Barrow when some promotional material for it was shared by Airdorf Games, developer of FAITH, on Twitter, and given that Return to Monkey Island had put me in the point-and-click mood it was more or less an instant purchase. I like stories set in Victorian England and I also enjoy weird fiction and folk horror, so everything I saw made me think that Hob's Barrow would probably appeal to my sensibilities.

And indeed I spent a good part of a recent long weekend playing Hob's Barrow and I found myself coming back to it each day wanting more, which I think is about the strongest recommendation I can give. It's far from perfect, but given that it was apparently developed in the developer's spare time I think it's an admirable achievement. It took me about eight hours to play through, and that was with a fair bit of wandering around following the game's various objectives, but I wouldn't be surprised if it took less time for an experienced player. Regardless, I think it was worth the twenty-ish bucks Australian that I paid for it.

In Hob's Barrow you play as Thomasina Bateman, a "barrow digger" or, to put it in more contemporary parlance, a Victorian-era paleontologist-archaeologist who has come to the small town of Bewlay in northern England at the invitation of one of the locals to excavate an ancient grave site. As usual with this kind of folk mystery experience she faces a good deal of obfuscation, superstition and reservation from the locals while getting to know the town and countryside. Over the course of the game her own backstory is revealed, and the mystery of the titular barrow, and her own involvement with it, is uncovered.

The strongest element of Hob's Barrow is the atmosphere. The game is set in a small rural town in the north of England, amid sweeping moorland and beneath overcast skies. Rain and foggy evenings add to the feeling of both quietude and sublimity of such a landscape. The music contributes to this significantly as well, with a strong ambience pervading many of the scenes. The game is also rendered in the kind of engaging pixel art that I personally really love and which has become a convention of these kinds of games. It's only let down on a few occasions when elements are scaled at different resolutions, which creates a visual clash; old LucasArts games would compress sprites when they were intended to appear at a more distant perspective, which looked crunchy, but at least they still fit within the image because a pixel was still a pixel. When you have low-resolution pixel art blown up to a higher scale to fit modern screens, it doesn't work so well when some sprites in the "distance" seem to be at a higher level of detail than the rest of their environment. Nonetheless, the game has a decent amount of sprite animation, and isn't too reliant on the fade-in fade-out technique that a lot of lower-budget adventure games use to avoid having to animate complex actions.

My biggest critique of Hob's Barrow would largely come down to the story and characters. There's a curious recurrence in all the AGS games I've mentioned in this review of having the protagonist be a young woman with an absent father or father-figure, and for her relationship with her father to in some respect drive her motivation or characterisation, and I find it also noteworthy that all three of these games were written, as far as I'm aware, by men. Thomasina's father William was a barrow-digger before her, but has been a silent invalid for decades as a result of an unexplained accident during her childhood. Thus her motivation begins with trying to carry on her father's legacy; it ultimately ends with her trying to cure her father of his ailment. Perhaps it's just me, but I find this parent-driven characterisation, while realistic, a little tired as a character device.

Similarly, the plot is perhaps too conventional for its own good. Thomasina is invited to excavate the barrow by one of the locals, and it's ultimately revealed that not only had her father excavated the same site previously, but it was the cause of his accident. While the discovery is naturally disturbing in-game for the character, it's a little neater than I like in this kind of strange story. Further, it's ultimately revealed that certain locals have brought Thomasina there for the very purpose of uncovering a powerful force that was previously sealed away by her father, in the hope of releasing it so that it will grant them power and plenty. If you've ever seen the original The Wicker Man from 1973, elements of this conspiracy plot aren't too surprising. Further still, while the game spends a good deal of time introducing the town of Bewlay and its inhabitants, the dénouement with the actual barrow excavation and the uncovering of its secrets is rather hastily done and doesn't give itself too much time to build up a sense of dread and inevitability. When friendly local Arthur Tillett reveals to Thomasina that he overheard her two apparent allies discussing the plot to lure her to the town, it gives away a bit too much too unambiguously (and too soon). Similarly, the game builds up and up to the actual excavation, only for the entire process to occur in a narrated cutaway, when having the excavation take several days and have its own complications would probably have heightened the tension. Further, once she enters the barrow itself and comes across strange ruins and eerie purple lights, unfortunately I found it all rather too much in keeping with a typical pastiche of a story by H.P. Lovecraft or one of his imitators. The game's commentary mentions the ghost stories of M.R. James as an inspiration, but I don't quite see it. A clearer inspiration is the point and click horror adventure game series The Last Door.

I also wanted to add that the use of the period setting feels a little inconsistent. At times the characters speak and interact much as I imagine Victorian-era people would, especially with an outsider. However, I can't help but suspect that in reality an unaccompanied young woman arriving in town, asking lots of questions, frequenting the local pub and getting about in breeches would probably have caused a massive stir at the time. I appreciate that this is partly the point of Thomasina's character but sometimes it makes it difficult to take the setting entirely seriously. One thing I noted in particular is that some of the characters are implausibly familiar with Thomasina and vice-versa, using first names and nicknames; it's also not very realistic, I don't think, that Thomasina, as an upper-class or at least upper-middle-class woman of the time, would need (or even think to use) a maid to introduce her to the local aristocracy. These are just nitpicks of course but they stand out when at times the characters do seem to speak mostly in an appropriate idiom and behave as people of the era would.

As far as gameplay is concerned, Hob's Barrow isn't a particularly difficult puzzle game. The puzzles generally require more exploration than lateral thinking, taking the opportunity to re-explore the environment after certain conditions have changed. The town of Bewlay feels large enough and each day there is a list of goals, which helps with keeping track. A seasoned adventure game player won't be slowed down by any of this but it does given the opportunity to let the environments feel well-used, which, given that the game's atmosphere is its strongest feature, makes them complimentary of the broader picture. I should also add that apart from some children's voices which are clearly just adult women adopting squeaky tones the voice acting is strong overall, as is the use of appropriate regional accents and slang.

Overall, despite my view that it's lacking a certain degree of originality in terms of its story and characters, and has some issues with pacing, I enjoyed playing The Excavation of Hob's Barrow. Folk horror is an interesting concept, preferably when it isn't too needlessly Lovecraftian, and this game certainly kept me invested. Further, as I've said above, I have to give the developers credit for making this game as a side project. The main takeaway, I think, with all of these points is that atmosphere can be a huge factor in the success of an adventure game, and creating a world that players want to stick around in goes a long way, even if other elements are very familiar.

"Life is Strange: True Colors"

Shouldn't it be "Life is Strange: True Colours" in the PAL market?

 

Spoilers, for the entire Life is Strange series, obviously.

 

Anyway, I've always intended to publish a review of the original Life is Strange, one of my favourite story games (or pieces of interactive fiction) of the last decade. Yes, there's very little challenging gameplay, and the ending feels a bit rushed, and some of the dialogue reads like what middle-aged French men think American teenage girls talk like, but it has great atmosphere, strong voice acting and likeable characters. Some people don't like Chloe and I always found Max more relatable, but ultimately I thought that Life is Strange was moving and a lot of fun. That being said, I completely understand the school of thought that says that a huge part of the game's appeal is that it's a kind of "emotional intimacy simulator" above anything else which is why it has such a cult following and weirdly large fanbase of adult men. Nonetheless, having played the first game and enjoyed it as much as I did, naturally I played the sequel (by the same developers) and the prequel (by different developers), and now it's time for True Colors, the not-quite-second-sequel, developed by the developers of the prequel and featuring one of their characters.

True Colors, developer Deck Nine's second foray into the Life is Strange franchise, has the same strengths that I think form a big part of the series' appeal overall: nice atmosphere, good voice acting, and strong characters. It also has the same problem that their previous entry, the prequel Before the Storm, had, namely that it feels a bit unfulfilled and leaves you wanting more, the latter not necessarily being a bad thing, but like Before the Storm it feels like it could have been bigger. It's almost certainly the nicest-looking of the series so far, although given the tiny budgets of the original game and Before the Storm that isn't too surprising, but I still think lighting, environment and music-wise the original game had the best atmosphere.

A lot of reviews I've read have already pointed out the same things that I was feeling about the game: that it looks nice, that the characters are good but it feels like we don't spend enough time with them, that the gameplay is pretty simplistic, that the twist is stupendously obvious and predictable, and that the game feels very eager to evoke the beloved original game. It certainly feels like the game is trying to be conspicuously unlike Life is Strange 2, with that game's child protagonists, rotating cast of secondary characters, and heavy representation of American racial politics. In True Colors you stay in one place, the small cast of supporting characters is entirely consistent from the first to the last chapter, you play as an adult and you can romance one of your friends. The most political message in the game is the uncontroversial "big ruthless mining corporations are bad". The community in which the game is set is very "liberal" as Americans like to put it, with a local marijuana dispensary and and seemingly a pretty clear acceptance of LGBTQIA people, but that seems to have finally reached the point in at least some parts of America where it's no longer questioned by the average person. You play as a young woman of Asian heritage, but this scarcely comes up; it's almost completely confined to the background. And all in all, for better or worse, it feels rather safe, not interested in evoking anything like the divisive second game.

And to focus on the negatives first, I think the biggest problem with True Colors is that it's trying to feel like Life is Strange the original, without that much of its own identity. You're a young woman who is an outsider but with connections in an atmospheric small town with a dark secret under the surface. There's a murder, and you try to investigate. One thing True Colors seems to try to expand upon is Life is Strange's nascent theme of corporate greed and ruthlessness, the dangling plot thread of the original game's malevolent Prescott Foundation here replaced by the payoff-and-coverup-happy Typhon Mining Company. And the theme of governmental corruption is present here as it was in Before the Storm with the police and town council under the thumb of the criminally negligent corporation.

All this probably wouldn't matter if it weren't for the fact that, as I've said, we just don't get to spend as much time with the characters as might be beneficial. To be fair, I don't have a huge amount of patience for long, story-driven games if I'm not engaged with the characters and story, and I rarely am, but the thing that has always separated Life is Strange from other narrative-heavy games in the market is that, apart from the element of one character typically having some kind of supernatural power, and some sort of mystery or crime to investigate, they're all fairly grounded in real-world slice-of-life stuff which, as a boring overeducated man in my thirties, I find entirely more interesting than fantasy and science fiction adventures.

True Colors at its best maintains this; some of the most enjoyable parts of the game, in my view, are simple things like showing the local bar proprietor that, despite your lack of experience, you've got what it takes to check on the regular patrons; or hanging out in your apartment playing foosball with your friends; or rocking out at the annual town festival. All of this stuff, along with an extended Live Action Roleplay sequence, are where the game really shines, and I can't help but find myself wondering whether a Life is Strange game really needs a central mystery (murder or otherwise) or even too much of a supernatural element. Before the Storm certainly downplayed the latter, with vague suggestions of Rachel Amber having some supernatural potency, and Chloe's intense and disturbing dreams, being the only intrusion of the otherworldly into a fairly grounded narrative. I find myself wondering whether True Colors would have been better if it had just been the story of Alex Chen's life in Haven Springs, Colorado, and what that was like after ten or more years in the foster care system.

That brings us to the details of the game proper, which I've avoided going in depth with in my ruminations to this point, namely that in the game you play as Alex Chen, orphan and supernatural empath, who is reunited with her brother Gabe after eight years of separation, in the paradisal town of Haven Springs, Colorado. Gabe has lived in the town for a few years while growing up and trying to find Alex; he spent years in juvenile detention after stealing a car in his teens, which caused them to be separated. On Alex's first day in town, however, Gabe is killed in a landslide caused by mining blasting while they're trying to rescue his girlfriend's son, Ethan, and Alex spends the remainder of the game trying to determine why the blasting happened even after Gabe had called in to stop the detonation.

The problem with all this is that it's very predictable. And a story doesn't have to surprise me to be good; of course not. But the fact is that yes, the mining corporation was negligent, because they were desperate to cover up another accident that happened twelve years prior before the inspectors arrive, an accident which involved your (and formerly Gabe's) boss/landlord, town hero Jed Lucan, who was blatantly obvious even from the first trailer of the game as being the main culprit. When I played the original Life is Strange, as predictable as it is in hindsight, I was completely blindsided by the revelation that the affable but allegedly somewhat unprofessional photography teacher Mark Jefferson was the true villain, to the extent that I recall audibly saying "Oh, shit," when he was revealed at the end of the penultimate episode as the culprit. With this in mind, it was all too obvious starting True Colors that Jed was in a similar position to Jefferson: the seemingly trustworthy, warm, welcoming figure who turns out to have a dark secret made all the more obvious by how personable and nice they are. And I kept saying, out loud, as I was playing, "There was a mining accident," "Jed is the real killer", "Jed's behind it", and of course I turned out to more or less be right.

The reason I spell all these spoilers out is not to rag on the game, because I still really enjoyed it. The problem is that I think we needed more of this "normal life" stuff and less of the mystery, because, and I hate to say it, it's not that interesting. Arguably, Alex needs closure over why Gabe was killed, but other than that it's not particularly intriguing. It's already clear that the mining company is negligent and desperate to present itself as a positive force in the community despite that. The game shows us, as others have pointed out, images of things like Alex spending time with her new friends Steph and Ryan (Steph having been a fan favourite side character in Before the Storm) and other goings-on around town, and like many others I found myself wishing that I'd had the opportunity to see those moments rather than focusing, as episode two does for instance, on the investigation into the misdeeds of Typhon. Maybe that would have turned the game, as some have argued, into a "dating sim", but who cares? Even though probably the main theme of the games tends to be about what motivates us to use power, and what is really meant by the idea of using power "for good", I think the appeal of Life is Strange has almost always been its atmosphere and representation of real life relationships to a much greater extent than the mysteries. That being said, I understand that in the past, when Life is Strange games were released episodically, there was much fan speculation about what was going to happen next in the plot, which drove enthusiasm for the series; I only came to it after the original, the sequel and the prequel were all fully released, and thus I was able to play them all sequentially without waiting. So that's never been something I've expected of the series, and in any event it seems like players are almost always disappointed when they spend months speculating and the plot resolution typically ends up being something a lot less intricate and grandiose than they were anticipating.

It feels like much of the filling-in about character backstories is fleshed out through unlockable diary entries linked to the collectible character memories, which, as I elaborate upon further below, I didn't even realise were in the game until near the end of my second playthrough. I knew the memories were recorded, but not that you could click on them to get diary entries about them. I wonder if this was intended to be in the game proper but they didn't have the time or money to do cutscenes or interactive sequences for them, or if they were always intended to simply sit in the background because the developers couldn't figure out how to fit them into the game. 

True Colors also sells itself, as so many modern adventure games in the interactive fiction mold do now, of having "choices"; it's always been the complaint that in Life is Strange the choices that you make don't really shape the plot much, they just sort of affect your relationships with the game's characters to a certain extent. And I think that's fine because back in the original Life is Strange I felt that your inability to really shape events beyond your relationships with the characters was kind of the point; Max could change time, but she couldn't change people, only exploit her abilities to manipulate them in a way about which she clearly feels guilty. But that's the thing; Life is Strange the first's mechanic was time travel, an element which none of the subsequent games have had. So there's no reason in subsequent games for player choice to be such a big deal. In the original the whole point was you could agitate over your choices depending on what you thought was the best outcome, second guess yourself and revert them, only for the game to show you that it often didn't really matter, or that often there was no "good" outcome, just one set of consequences or another, and that the only real power Max needed was the ability to accept the consequences of her decisions.

In True Colors, Alex's power is that she can see and experience the emotions of others, to the extent that if they're felt strongly enough she's effectively able to read their thoughts, and become overwhelmed by other people's feelings. Obviously, a bit like Max's ability to see what the consequences of her decisions will be and then go back, Alex's ability to clearly identify what others are feeling and why potentially gives her the power to manipulate people. And yet one of my most satisfying parts of the game was when I was offered the choice to either take away the overwhelming anger of Gabe's grieving girlfriend Charlotte or leave her to deal with her grief, and of course I chose the latter, because it seemed to me that is was neither Alex's responsibility nor her right to take Charlotte's feelings away from her. That was a choice that I felt made sense because it related to how Alex used her powers. It seemed to be saying that often the best way to use power is to not use it at all. On the other hand, taking Deputy Pike's fear away from him in the fourth chapter works out for the best; is it supposed to be that his fear is holding him back, while Charlotte's anger is a necessary part of her grief? I'm unsure. In any event, at many other times the "important" choices aren't related to this and seem like they'd fit more in the original time-travel-driven storytelling of the first Life is Strange, because they didn't tie into Alex's power. Life is Strange 2, by contrast, worked in having choices because it so substantially affected the relationship between Sean and Daniel. The choices in Before the Storm always felt the most pointless to me because we know ultimately that they won't avert anything that happens in the original game. But the idea of a game about "player choice" and its consequences still seems so tied to the original game's grounding in time travel that it seems to be presented as an important gameplay mechanic and narrative device in all subsequent games, including this one, simply because "that's what Life is Strange games have" and not because it tied into the first game's wider themes and techniques. And I can't hold Deck Nine, developers of True Colors and Before the Storm, solely guilty of this, because Dontnod did it too in Life is Strange 2, and they were the developers of the original game. The artifice is particularly obvious in this game which, unlike all of the three previous, was released in one go, with the effect that the chapter divisions, featuring a page comparing the player's choices to that of others as a percentage, feels arbitrary, and almost like the game was divided up into five chapters simply because "Life is Strange games are in five bits with a choice breakdown at the end of each" even though this game didn't have an episodic release schedule.

And given that True Colors is notionally about our experience of emotions (fear, sadness, anger, joy), it feels like the game could have spent less time worrying about consequences (something far more relevant to the time-travelling Max of the original Life is Strange than the emotion-reading Alex) and done a lot more with exploring how our emotions define us; why is it okay for us to take Pike's fear but not Charlotte's grief? To what extent does Alex potentially manipulate Ryan or Steph into developing feelings for her by reading their emotions and then knowing exactly what to say (something Max's doppelganger accuses Max of doing through time travel in the first game, incidentally)? The idea that Jed is so in denial about what he did during the mining accident that his emotions are buried beneath Alex's notice is interesting, but worth exploring to a much greater extent. What's the connection between emotion and thought? There's a lot more that could be done here, and given that the Life is Strange series has thus far not shown an interest in direct sequels, it's a shame that we presumably won't see Alex's story explored further.

Once again all of this just seems like I'm ragging on True Colors or that I didn't like it, which isn't the case; rather, I'm frustrated, because I feel like this is a game with so much potential that just doesn't get completely fulfilled. As I've said, visually, the game is very impressive, the voice acting is top notch and the characters are really enjoyable to watch. As someone who essentially likes Before the Storm despite its numerous flaws, I was pleased to see the return of fan-favourite character Steph from that game and to see her used in a more substantial way. The other main supporting character, Ryan, is well-acted too, although I didn't connect with him as much after the first episode. Sometimes the consequences for the game's mandatory plot elements feel refreshingly realistic, like when Alex steals corporate data in Chapter 3 and then, appropriately, gets arrested for it at the end of Chapter 4. And I was also pleased to see that the game, as other recent-ish narrative games like Night in the Woods did, has games-within-games, for that element of skill-based challenge which these no-lose story-driven adventure games of the modern type (i.e. without inventory puzzles) otherwise usually lack.

I think the best parts of the game are when you're wandering around Alex's apartment above the bar and walking through the town of Haven Springs proper, getting to know the various residents and helping them out. Another standout moment is in the third chapter in which you cheer up Ethan by going LARPing with him, a logical extension of the amusing tabletop roleplaying segments in Before the Storm. A similar enjoyable sequence is when Alex and Steph perform the Violent Femmes' "Blister in the Sun", as overplayed as it is, at the Spring Festival, because this is the stuff that the appeal of these games is made of, just like iconic scenes from the first game such as Max reminiscing at Chloe's house. That's what makes Life is Strange memorable, and this game certainly has its share. If only there were more.

One thing I noticed about this game is that it's arguably less surreal than the original or Before the Storm; its dream sequences, for instance, are much more like Sean's dreams about his father in Life is Strange 2, as Alex recalls her childhood and speaks to Gabe as if he were still alive. They're much more conventional than Chloe's bizarre and disturbing nightmares about her late father in Before the Storm, or the Lynchian dream sequence in the final episode of the original Life is Strange. That being said, another appealing moment was in the final chapter of the game in which Alex dreams that she's back in her psychiatrist's office from the beginning of the game, only for it to be revealed that the psychiatrist is just a tape recorder sitting in an empty office chair. There's also the amusing sequence in which, while LARPing with Ethan and tapping into his emotions, Alex sees the world through the eyes of a child's imagination, and they really are fantasy heroes on a quest in a magical land and not just running around the park wearing silly hats. I could have done with more moments like this in which the artifice of the world, reflective of the extent to which the mining company has clearly tried very intentionally to turn the town into an idyllic refuge, is made clear. The exploration in the final chapter of Alex's childhood is quite harrowing, but I think, as others have suggested, it might have worked better had those moments been interspersed throughout the game. I think it's very easy to miss, for instance, that it's implied as early as the first chapter that Gabe originally came to Haven Springs looking for their father, and that it's not pure coincidence, as it seemed to me at the time, that the late John Chen met his end in the very mining accident for which Jed was responsible. In fact, this is outright stated early in the game, but only in Riley's online memorial post for Gabe, and in the diary entries connected to Alex's unlockable memories which I only realised even existed as readable content at the end of my second playthrough. Anyway, In particular, I think the use of these dream sequences is a bit anticlimactic because the one about Alex's mother's death is captured much more neatly in the optional dialogue about the photograph in the first chapter of the game, and that the stuff about Alex's life in the orphanage, the climax of the dream sequence, is all stuff we already know if we've bothered to read the game's flavour text, i.e. that Alex was moved into foster care multiple times but always ended up back in the group home. Incidentally, I don't know how the foster care system works in the USA, but is it really realistic that Alex is still living in the group home at the age of 21? Don't people become adults at 18 in the States? Wouldn't she have been moved on? Anyway, it feels to me like the only really essential part of the flashback sequence is the scene revealing that Alex and Gabe were actually abandoned by their father, and that the rest was a little overdone.

This discourse is becoming very long, so let's finally talk about endings. Life is Strange had two endings. Before the Storm really only had one with very minor differences depending on your final choice, but that was arguably appropriate given that it was a prequel. Life is Strange 2 had multiple endings depending on how the player had driven Sean's relationship with Daniel; I must admit that when I played it I got an ending I didn't expect (Daniel helped Sean escape to Mexico and then turned himself in to the authorities). In any event, I could see that True Colors was going to go the way of having a fairly unambiguously happy ending (although I kind of wondered if the game was going to pull the rug out from under me at the last minute, but it didn't). It all depends on whether you choose to stay in Haven Springs or leave, and if you chose to be with Steph, Ryan or neither. In my first playthrough, being the Before the Storm apologist that I am, I naturally chose to get close to Steph throughout the game and, given that I didn't think Alex would much fancy living in the town where both her father and brother had been killed, at the end she and Steph left for a life of adventure. Seemed sensible enough. The only shortcoming was that Ryan was left alone, but given that I didn't connect with him that much anyway I didn't see that as too great a loss. So the ending felt a little insignificant. In my second play-through, I chose to stay in Haven (still with Steph) and there wasn't much more to see than what Gabe's memory describes to you in the flash-forward you see before the choice is offered. Even though you can fail to convince the local community that Jed tried to kill you, you can't fail to cause Jed to confess, which seemed really odd to me, because this is something that does actually relate to how the game explores emotions, with Alex unpacking all of Jed's feelings about the accident. So at the end of the day, the conspiracy between Jed and Typhon is revealed and justice is more or less served. At least Steph sticks up for you no matter what. It kind of feels like the True Colors developers, having had such success with the fans with Steph in Before the Storm, didn't want you to ever see her in a bad light, but as I've said I don't think choices ever actually need to be that important in the game except where they relate to the game's central premise, so I thought that was fine.

But I'm left at the end of this thinking: what is it that Life is Strange games offer their fans and is that what they set out to achieve? Are they intended to be mystery dramas offering some kind of meditation on the consequences of our choices and how we manage and utilise anything about ourselves that might be extraordinary? Or are they slice-of-life emotional intimacy simulators that appeal because so many of us are so starved for, or unable to see, the depth and beauty that might exist in our real lives? And is the former what their developers want them to be, while the latter is what they've become? Is it really the fault of the game if it leaves us with a sense of longing because for a little while it was so good at allowing us to pretend that we were another person with a stranger (and more emotionally connected) life than our own? Surely in that regard it's a success.

Indeed, I suppose it's testament to my appreciation of True Colors that the first thing I did after finishing it was to play it again; you can easily get close to thirty hours of gameplay out of two complete run-throughs if you take your time, and given how much dialogue there is that can only be seen on one play-through or another this definitely pays off. That was more or less what I did with both the original Life is Strange and Before the Storm as well, although I've only played Life is Strange 2 through once; I found it too dark to want to repeat. The game almost certainly is too expensive for the amount of "content" in it, and the fact that the Steph DLC (unreleased at time of writing) requires an additional payment. But while I don't expect a Life is Strange game to offer the "40 hours of gameplay" that seems to have become de rigueur among a lot of AAA video game players, I do wonder if it's time for the franchise to step up into a more 25-ish hour base game experience with more of the slice-of-life stuff that clearly a very large part of its target market is in for. I don't know, really. A lot of story-based games aren't actually that long. Is True Colors really as short as people are saying, or does time just fly when you're getting to pretend that you have feelings?

"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.