Ohhh, Loom, what a great game!
In 1995 as a youngster I got some birthday money and bought Loom (and Dune 2! And Super Tetris for some reason) as a budget big box PC game. Still got the box!
Loom was one of those adventure games I read a lot about from PC magazines in Finland. I think I had the preconception that it was going to be short, easy, but unique, and have an interesting fairy tale atmosphere.
Turns out I liked it a lot. I remember musing about it being A _REAL_ INTERACTIVE MOVIE to my friends – it was the FMV craze going on at the time. (Not that I played much of those first hand with our quickly ageing pre- CD-ROM home PC). It really felt like an interactive cartoon, and indeed, it was “actually interactive” with its interesting musical puzzle mechanic.
I had to do just enough thinking to make solving the puzzles enjoyable; especially reversing some of the spells to solve some situations felt fun! (I think my OK but not great English skills at the time might have made some of the puzzles slightly more difficult, but these games were certainly motivating to improve my learning of the language). There were a lot of great animation rewards for the solutions as well – the fairy tale story certainly allows for whimsical animations as rewards. The EGA graphics are gorgeous as well!
I suppose in retrospect it really cuts the story short. But … I wasn’t disappointed when I finished back in the day, that I remember. It was a complete enough story for me.
I think I’ll try to play the fan sequel, The Forge, in April. I already re-played Loom a couple of years earlier and while it was cool to install it to the same old PC from the floppies, as far as the game itself, I still remembered every solution and got a lot less out of the experience than I expected!
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btw, the budget version I have has an interesting bug, I might spare talking about for later 😀 (suspense!)
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