Loom, from Lucasfilm Games, is the finest Mac adventure game I’ve seen to date. The color graphics are always interesting or arresting. The excellent sound and music suit the story, and the simplified interface means that you don’t have to type look at rock a hundred or so times.
You start out as 17-year-old Bobbin Threadbare, who lives on Loom Island with the Guild of Weavers. Tlie Weavers use sequences of musical notes to spin powerful magic drafts (spells), but they have inexplicably excluded you from their teachings. Suddenly catastrophe strikes the Guild, and all the Weavers disappear. You must then assume the magic staff of the elders to learn their fate and to find your long-lost mother. At the beginning you can use only a few notes of the staffs magical scale; but as you explore, gain knowledge, and solve problems, you learn to use more notes and spin more powerful drafts.
Romancing the Tones
An important difference between Loom and text adventure games is that with Loom you don’t have to type any text. You point and click to move the character through his perilous encounters with an evil cleric, a rather eccentric dragon, and Chaos himself. To play the four notes you click on the specific part of the magical staff that produces the appropriate tone (or you can type the letters of the musical scale). If you’ve seen an animation before, you can bypass it by pressing ⌘-period.
Compared to some adventure games. Loom’s a pleasure to play: you don’t have to spend time trying to pick up or push every rock and twig, and it’s unlikely that you’ll have to start the game over from the beginning because you forgot to dot an i somewhere along the way. Power adventure-game players may object that every useful object is highlighted in a separate box when you place the cursor over the object, thereby reducing the thrilling “Eureka!” experience, but it also reduces the frustrating “Where the $*#@% is that magic wand!” experience, and it eliminates a ton of typing.
It’s clear that Lucasfilm designed Ix)om to tell a story more than to pose a tremendous mental challenge, although there are plenty such problems to suit most tastes. Also, the character is nonviolent; you occasionally startle the heck out of some folks, but you don’t intentionally hurt anybody.
In the Green Glass City
Once I figured out how to leave Loom Island, I particularly enjoyed exploring the city of CrystalGard, where you can sometimes see through several layers of the green glass walls. Eventually 1 decided to leave CrystalGard even though I had not solved a few mysteries that are apparently insolvable in this first game. That leads to my main criticism of Loom, which is that it ends with a cliff-hanger and is not a complete, self-contained adventure. Its title should have been something more like First Thread in the Loom. I felt let down at the end of the, shall we say, episode, because there was no feeling of closure in several senses of that word. Multiple hints in the game indicate that there will be a “Return of the Loom,” or “The Chaos Strikes Back” in our future, and yes I’m looking forward to it. The company also includes the hint book with the game, instead of charging $15 or $20 and making you wait for it to come in the mail.
The bottom line is that Loom is great fun. It has a high degree of enchantment, some sweet mysteries, a simple interface, and beautiful graphics, animations, and music. If you like adventure games, and especially if you have a color system, I highly recommend Loom.
Moran, Tom. (September 1991). Loom 1.0. Macworld. (pgs. 245, 248).
Brian Moriarty
Games
out of 10 (1 vote)
437 / 
2014-04-14 / 
2023-04-23 / 
aed47f2459929ccb9b71044b963c44f4b8346642 / 
/ 
loom_1_0.zip
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
