Loom

I'd never played Loom but I had heard good things so I decided that this would be the first game that I would work my way through. Before you get going on this somewhat magial adventure there are a few things that you might need.

The game manual - A basic explaination of how to play the game.
The book of patterns - This is very helplful. I will come onto this in a short while.

Loom does more than a few things differently to most adventure games. There is no inventory system for a start. All of your interaction with the game world is done through the use of music. You can select an object in the environment and then play a short tune, or draft, to interact with it. These short tunes are described in the book of patterns. They are different in every game (apart from the open and transcendence drafts) so you will need to write them down as you learn them. I printed off the book of drafts to make things a bit easier.

The story is somewhat unique as well. All of the peoples of the world have banded together into various guilds based on their skills. You play the role of Bobbin Threadbare, who is a member of the guild of weavers. This particular guild have moved beyond simply weaving carpets and can now weave the very fabric of reality itself using a special loom (from where the game gets its name). You can probably guess that bad things happen and you have to save the day. I'll let you play the game to find out what happens though.

The original game came packaged with a 30 minute audio casette with some more background on the story but I have been unable to get a copy. This hasn't caused too much grief. Although the story is a little weird you will be able to work out what is going on.

There are a couple of versions of this game knocking around. The main two that you may come accross are for the PC. One comes on disks and the other on a CD. The CD version of the game includes enhanced graphics and a voiceover track. However, it is missing a lot of the music. This is because the CD can only hold 74 minutes of uncompressed audio and most of this is taken up by the talking. There are also a number of close up scenes in the original game (similar to those in Monkey Island) that are missing from the CD version. I would actually recommend playing the diskette version for the full musical experience but the CD version is also fantastic. There is information on extracting the music for the CD version for use with ScummVM on their homepage.

The CD version of the game

and the original version

The game is quite short and I was able to play through the entire thing on the standard difficulty in a single sitting but while it lasts this is a brilliantly imaginative and different gaming experience. There is nothing like this that has been done before or since and I definitely recommend that everybody tries to play at least once.