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I know I've made mention of games that use the SCUMM engine having some kind of easily
identifiable look and feel. Namely the verb grid down the bottom, the inventory next to
it and all the prettiness up the top. And that worked pretty well without much need
for an overhaul; there was the odd attempt to stretch the engine out a little bit; Monkey
Island utilized it's dialog trees for insult sword-fighting, Fate of Atlantis had branching
paths based on player choice, Sam & Max did it's best impression of a Sierra game interface
for some reason. But there's one game from this era that's a clear odd one out; so much
so it's barely recognisable as a SCUMM game at all. You wanna know more about it? Ask
me about Loom.
Quick plot dump first of all; Loom tells the tale of Bobbin Threadbare, a young man born
into the Guild of Weavers but forbidden from practising their magic by the Elders. Yet
one of their kind, a woman named Hetchel, educates Bobbin anyway. The Elders attempt
to enact their punishment by turning her into a swan (which sounds pretty sweet, to be honest)
but only manage to turn Hetchel into an egg. As they're pondering what went wrong, a swan
bursts in and turns the Elders themselves into swans. Bobbin, who was hiding off to
the side of the Great Loom, watches as the Elders take their new bird forms through a
rift while cursing his name. Bobbin picks up the magic staff one of the Elders was weilding
and helps open Hetchel's egg. Explaining that that Bobbin was feared from birth, which is
why the Elders prevented him from learning their weaving way, she tells him to find the
rest of the swans and follows the Elders through the rift. Magic stick in tow, he sets off
to find the Weavers and, hopefully, find out just what in the ***. On the way you'll travel
across the sea, meet invisible shepherds, talk to a pyrophobic dragon - y'know, typical
Weaver ***.
For a game that railed so hard against an established style, Loom was in fact only the
fourth game to make use of the SCUMM engine we all know and love today. What makes Loom
different is that there's no verbs or inventory whatsoever; you can double-click on objects
or people to examine or talk them, but that's it. Instead, you use the magic stick (boringly,
it's actually called a Distaff) to cast spells known as Drafts, which are made up of 4 notes
each. As you progress, you learn more Drafts and unlock higher notes on the Distaff with
which to cast said Drafts. And no, you can't short-circuit the game by attempting to cast
Drafts you haven't learned yet.
You can also cast certain Drafts backwards for an opposite effect; for example, you learn
a Draft that dyes things green - playing that Draft backwards returns the object to it's
original colour. For a skill that's essential to progressing in the game, it's either not
explained at all or I completely missed it. I do like the simple touch that some of the
Drafts are palindromes, meaning that their effects can't be reversed; it's much cleaner
than the kind of arbitrary error message you might see in other titles. Plus you can pretend
you're in an episode of Knightmare, trying to dispell one of Mordred's magical yarns
so... that's pretty cool. If you grew up in nineties Britain. *ahem* Anyway, if you want
a real challenge, the Expert mode takes the letter scale away so you have to identify
and play the notes by ear... ha ha, no.
As I've said, you find more Drafts as you go along, but it's up to you to keep track
of them so if you're going to play this, get a notepad and pen ready or play it windowed
with your favourite text editor open off to one side. I'm putting this down to minimalism,
personally, which makes it fit the rest of the tone; a seemingly rich lore with an atmospheric
and genuinely mysterious environment to go with it; you keep playing to find out more
about the world and your place in these strange events. Having a big-*** list of Drafts pop
up in front of you could well break that. Unfortunately, the game ends very quickly;
it's barely longer than Blazing Dragons. The fact that you essentially only have one item
does prevent a fair bit of backtracking, although the small environments and very linear nature
of the game mean that's not really an issue in the first place.
Since Loom is different from all it's peers, I've put together 5 quick tips in case you
decide to try it out:
1. Write the drafts down somewhere safe. Seriously, you won't remember them all and the game randomises
the notes each time; if you don't write them down, you'll need to start again. Just do
it 2. Double-click on any notable item you see
in case it can teach you a new Draft 3. Name the Drafts as you make note of them
and, if it's not a palindrome, name them by what they do if you can. That way you'll bear
in mind what it's opposite effect is in case you need it
4. You have to cast drafts on things, so click the thing you want to cast a draft on first.
When the thing's name appears, you can cast the draft
5. Use a walkthrough for this maze. Seriously, there's no shame in this, it's just a bloody
maze
There's so much more that I could talk about; how the story and music are adapted from the
ballet Swan Lake, the rumoured trilogy that was planned upon the game's completion, the
30-minute audio drama that shipped with early copies the game that explained Bobbin's origins
and how the Weavers transitioned from cloth makers to full-on magicians... but I need
to talk about the different versions of the game that came out. Because my goal with these
videos is to tell you if the game is worth playing... it's kind of the point of a review.
So to do that, I need to tell you which version you should play.
The main three I'm going to focus on here are the original floppy disk release, the
FM-Towns port and the PC CD-ROM re-release. Normally you'd think "Upgraded graphics and
voice acting - CD-ROM wins!" - hold your ***, there's more to it than that. Loom had to
cut a ***-bunch of dialogue when it moved to CD-ROM. Because every line of dialogue
was voiced and their voice-acting was done with a single track of uncompressed audio,
limiting them to 80 minutes of digital sound. It's the only time I've seen a CD-ROM version
that's less verbose than it's floppy counterpart. Bear in mind that floppy disks used to have
such tiny capacities that the developers had to worry about how much room their text was
taking up. On top of that, there's some close-up images that are missing, half the game is
devoid of any music or background noise and all of the selected item insets look astoundingly
non-VGA. If they were that short on space, I can think of some things that could have
been cut instead.
Does that mean you should go ahead and grab some copies of those floppies? Depends if
can you cope with this level of graphical fidelity? Bear in mind that some people consider
the floppy version to be as good as the 16-colour EGA graphics mode ever got. Whilst I never
let that put me off Space Quest III and I know that there's those who will swear by
the original, I know that some people have their limits. I mean even I was born a little
late to fully appreciate this sort of thing.
So that leaves the FM-Towns version. If you haven't heard of this, don't be embarrassed;
no-one has. The FM-Towns is a PC-variant mostly popular in Japan and lauded at the time for
it's multimedia capabilities. Y'know, back when having a sound card was something of
a luxury. The version released for this system lies somewhere in between the other two. VGA
graphics and upgraded music but minus the voice-acting and therefore, minus all the
dialogue cuts that made way for it. The voice-acting isn't bad, but it's not enough for me to shake
the feeling that there's something missing when you're playing the CD-ROM release.
So that's a full story but with old-timey visuals, better graphics and voice-acting,
but a shorter and less fleshed-out story, or good graphics, updated music and all the
text intact... yup, I find myself cho osing the middle ground - on FM-Towns you get VGA
prettiness, a nice rendition of the swan-laced soundtrack and it retains the dialogue lost
in the transition to CD-ROM. I've even read that Brian Moriarty, the game's main creator,
cites this as the definitive version of the game. Not that all the fans do or necessarily
should agree with him, but it still carries some weight.
With my verdict given, the issue of availability pops up. The only legal way to buy this game
nowadays is via Steam, which nets you the CD-ROM version. If it's voice-acting you want,
then great! Job done! And you can get the floppy disk version to run in ScummVM, in
case messing around with DOSBox isn't your thing. But what about the FM-Towns release
that I recommended about 50 seconds ago? Well, chances are you don't have an FM-Towns machine
lying around, but there's a way to get the that version running in ScummVM - provided
you've bought it on Steam. I really don't see a problem with this - you've already given
them money the only way that's possible, then taking a version of the game they are selling
and transforming it into a version they're never going to put out themselves.
And that big question which I've left a lot later than usual this episode; should you
play it? If you're into point 'n' click adventures, then yes. There's been innumerable takes on
the classic point 'n' click adventure interface over the years as the genre matured, but the
fact this plays in such a unique way and bearing in mind how different it was from other titles
of the time, that makes it worth a gander. If nothing else it'll explain those jokes
from The Secret of Monkey Island.