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Studio: |
LucasArts |
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Designer(s): |
Brian
Moriarty |
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Part of series: |
—— |
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Release: |
January 1990 (DOS) / April 1991 (FM Towns) / 1992 (DOS CD version) |
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Main credits: |
Programmers: Peter Lincroft, Kalani Streicher Music / Sound Effects: George Sanger (+
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky!) |
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Useful links: |
Complete
playthrough (104 mins.) |
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Many
of the finest video games from past decades, whether you revisit them as a
veteran player or (something that happens very rarely indeed) pick them up
out of historical curiosity, not even having been born at the time of their
original release, make you instinctively go, «oh, how I wish this one came
out or, at least, was remade today!»
And it’s not just the obvious matter of better graphics, sound, or gameplay
mechanics — usually it is also a matter of depth and detail, with modern
games allowing players the kind of immersion into one of those fantastic
universes that they could never be offered at the dawn of computer gaming,
when studios were small, writers were scarce, storage space was limited, and
a new game was supposed to provide you with, at most, a couple weeks worth of
entertainment / challenge (well, perhaps up to a month if it were some sort
of sprawling, repetitive, potentially infinite RPG or strategy game). Actual
situations where a classic experience from the early days would be dusted off
and remade in the full spirit of the original, but making full use of modern
possibilities, are very rare in the business — perhaps Resident Evil, whose lovingly crafted remake from 2002 all but
obliterated the need for the original, could be quoted as a textbook example
— but most of us «retro-philes» probably harbor those secret dreams for most of
our old favorites, if only out of a secret desire to pass our preferences on
to our children and our children’s children. There
are, however, cases when I look back at some
of these games and realize that they are perfect just as they are — that any
tinkering with the original concept, style, and laconic presentation will
hardly lead to anything other than cheapening the effect and dissipating the
magic. For instance, trying to transform something like Christy Marx’s Conquests Of Camelot into yet another
modern day episode of Assassin’s Creed
would remove the beauty of telling King Arthur’s story as a sort of simple,
elegant morality tale for children (including that inner child within us
grown-ups, of course); it might still have ended up a good game but it would
be an altogether different, and
probably much less unique title. Hampered by technical limitations, good
designers and writers in the 1980s and 1990s did not employ mere technical
solutions — they came up with their own ways to tell their story and immerse
you in their world, ways that no longer make sense in newer ages of gaming
but now look wond’rously strange and, perhaps, even oddly inspiring when,
like a finely aged silent movie, we approach them with the preconception of
«this feels so different!» rather
than «this feels so old!» No
other game from the Golden Age of Adventure Gaming epitomizes this feel for
me better than Brian Moriarty’s Loom,
LucasArts’ bizarre reimagining of Swan
Lake that, in a sense, remains the «ugly duckling» of the studio, though
perhaps «black sheep» would be more appropriate — the only openly non-comedic
game to come out of classic LucasArts, the only LucasArts adventure game
based on its own universe of lore and the only one to design and implement a
unique playing style that nobody has been able to properly emulate or develop
further ever since. Short, full of gaps and unanswered questions, in some
ways rather more like a demo or sketch than a completed game, it never got a
sequel, it never got a remake, it is largely ensconced in memory as a
dramatic failure (which it never was) — and, for what it’s worth, it should
probably stay right as it is. There is no way I can see to make this
perfect-for-1990-oddity work anew in the totally transformed age of video
gaming; even a simple graphic remastering would be questionable (and I had
absolutely no problems with the remastered graphics of Day Of The Tentacle or even the completely redrawn graphics of
the first two Monkey Island
games). Doubtlessly,
this is somewhat related to the personality of the game’s creator — and, as I
always insist, if you cannot properly align a video game with a specific
creative personality, that game probably ain’t worth a nickel. In this case,
we’re talking Brian Moriarty, an exceptionally bright and «outta-the-box»
alumnus of Southeastern Massachusets University with a degree in English
literature (which does often show) and a combined Steve Jobs-ian passion for
technology and the humanities, though, alas, none of that Steve Jobs-ian
talent for channelling public admiration. Moriarty’s early claims to fame
were his designing and writing for several classic text adventure titles for
Infocom — such as Trinity and Beyond Zork — but with the text
adventure market pretty much evaporating by the late Eighties, he had to find
a different outlet for his talents, and ended up at LucasArts, to which he
dedicated five years of his life — all of it resulting in one semi-finished
game that you can complete within 1-2 hours of gameplay (Loom) and one failed project which he ultimately had to give up
to other designers (The Dig, which
only saw commercial release two years after Moriarty’d already been gone from
the company). Since
absolutely nobody except for battle-hardened Gen X veterans (myself excluded
— I was born just a wee bit too late for that) plays text adventure games
anymore, and since Moriarty’s post-LucasArts career has concentrated far more
on writing and lecturing than on game designing, Loom is pretty much the only title he may count on being
remembered for — but even that one title is more than enough to be
remembered. It was neither «behind its time» nor «ahead of its time»; more
properly, it was «out of its time», a bizarre experiment heavily applauded by
the critical community and, for that matter, not exactly underappreciated by
the market — at the very least, it sold well enough to redeem its budget,
which was all that was required at the time to let you stay at LucasArts (don’t lose money and don’t embarrass George were the two
chief directives for everybody working in the company at the time — ah, the
Golden Age!). But
even though it ended almost literally in mid-game, the proposed sequel never
materialized — perhaps because, as it happened in the musical world to people
like Brian Wilson and Pete Townshend, the artistic ambitions of its author
ultimately proved too heavy and/or too confusing to smoothly get off the
ground. There might have been a way
to properly expand the fantastic universe created by its author, to build up
on the ideas for its musical background and gameplay mechanics, but neither
Moriarty himself nor anybody else was able to find it or implement it.
Although Loom was certainly not
the only LucasArts game to have never received a sequel (the same fate befell
Zak McKracken, for instance), it
became a proverbial example of a revered
and outstanding game not to receive
a sequel — going as far as to become a regular target of in-game inside jokes
for the studio, from the «ask me about Loom» running gag in the Monkey
Island games to the cheesy, but accurate exchange between Guybrush
Threepwood and Captain LeChuck in Curse
Of Monkey Island (Guybrush: «If you
kill me, there’ll be no more Monkey
Island sequels. No sequels means no work for you. You’ll become just
another has-been that nobody’s heard of.» LeChuck: «Ohhh! That could never happen to ME! I’m LeChuck!» Guybrush: «Do you know the name "Bobbin
Threadbare"?» LeChuck: «Uh, no».
Guybrush: «Exactly».) Apparently, there were plans for a sequel — in fact, Moriarty, staying well in line with the strategy of his company’s founder, envisioned Loom as a trilogy, with two subsequent parts that were to be called Forge and The Fold, respectively, but the first of these never went beyond a basic planning document, and the second left behind nothing but the name. (A curious Italian-based fan project tried to resurrect Forge about two decades ago, but wound up abandoned with just a demo version of the first chapter, and what I’ve actually seen did not really look too promising anyway). Given that Loom, in its finished form, ended up pretty tiny compared to even contemporary LucasArts games, and yet Moriarty complained about creative and physical exhaustion after the title finally shipped, this is hardly surprising. What is surprising, or at least what is a bit of a puzzle worth looking into, is how such a short and almost minimalistic game could have resulted in such an exhaustion. Was there really something extra special about Loom, something that required spending two or three times the amount of artistic mana as compared to the usual line of product delivery — or was it all just a big and hollow put-on, a bunch of empty, dead-end ambitions that resulted in a stillborn oddity rather than a unique, inimitable masterpiece? This is what we’ll be trying to understand over the course of the ensuing review — so let’s get to it. |
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Content evaluation |
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Brian Moriarty’s ambitions as a storywriter for the video game
market go back to a much earlier period than Loom — his text-based Trinity
for Infocom was, after all, about altering time and space in order to save
the world from nuclear apocalypse — and there can be no doubt that he was
specifically hired at LucasArts to try and find a somewhat more serious angle
for the studio than the goofy, sarcastic fun style it had become tightly
associated with ever since Maniac
Mansion had established LucasArts as a serious challenge to Sierra’s
monopoly on graphic adventure games. Loom
is certainly not devoid of humor — there are plenty of sarcastic one-liners
and inside jokes to make the player smile — but it was, indeed, the first
LucasArts game to date where humor, satire, and goofiness were not the chief
focus of the designers. Instead, Moriarty made an attempt to flesh out a story that,
while essentially sticking to the common gaming trope of the
save-the-world-from-evil-boss type, could draw the player in with its own
unique fantasy universe, the kind of thing that was relatively common in RPGs
but not so much in adventure games. Of course, Sierra had King’s Quest for the fairy-tale nerds
and Space Quest for sci-fi nerds,
but both of these franchises were there mostly for the basic story, the
puzzles, and (in the case of Space
Quest) some good laughs. Meanwhile, Loom
was there for the vision — the grand
vision, as it were. Previous adventure games skirted around the idea of
epicness, borrowing motifs, characters, and occasional phrase turns from epic
folklore and literature; Loom was
to dive into the world of EPOS head first, taking the same kind of risk that
George Lucas had done with Star Wars
twelve years earlier. As in all of the allegedly «original» fantasy universes
submitted for our approval over the past half-century or so in all the areas
of artistic creativity, Loom is
mostly a synthesis, taking its inspiration from sources as far removed from
us as Greek tragedies and epic poems, and as close to us as the latest Star Wars and Indiana Jones movies (this is
LucasArts, after all). Somewhere in between lies such an odd source of
inspiration as Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake,
appropriated for its transformation motifs rather than its tragic romance
(the one thing that Loom either
did not have time for, or did not care about in the first place). Yet despite
all the influences and borrowings, the universe of Loom has its own patented structure, and the major plot engine of
Loom — the idea of integrating the
motifs of weaving and music-making — belongs exclusively to
the mind of Mr. Moriarty. Take O’Shaugnessy’s (and Willy Wonka’s, and Aphex
Twin’s...) famous "We are the
music makers / And we are the dreamers of dreams / Wandering by lone
sea-breakers / And sitting by desolate streams / World-losers and
world-forsakers / On whom the pale moon gleams / Yet we are the movers and
shakers / Of the world for ever, it seems" — then change just one
word, dreamers, to weavers, and there you have it: the
meaning of Loom in a nutshell. Even an abbreviated retelling of Loom’s entire plot would take too much space; there is quite a
lot that happens over its less than two hours running time, and what is not
there directly in the game had to be crammed into a 30-minute audio Prologue
that actually came packaged together with the disks as an additional audio tape
(!). To single out just the main points, the whole thing takes place in some
ultra-distant future period, when, after the collective actions of Trump,
Putin, Taylor Swift, Elon Musk, and people who invented words such as
«vlogging» and «microtransactions» (sorry), the world as we know it has
effectively collapsed — perhaps several times — and the remaining survivors,
in order to ensure the most efficient way of prolonging their survival, have
become segregated into small professional communities, the Guilds, with each
Guild reaching the ultimate perfection in their particular skill,
occasionally even crossing into the supernatural. Why exactly this strict
division of labor (presumably, with a decent bartering service set up among
the different Guilds) has helped humanity survive better than any other
remains a mystery, but it did
result in the Guild of Weavers managing to tap right into the very fabric of
the universe, with their Great Loom almost taking on a life of its own and
capable of producing unpredictable, baffling, and occasionally dangerous
patterns (hello, ChatGPT!). For this, the Weavers were banned to a remote
island, where, seemingly, they have been spending the last thousand or so
years of their lives trying to contain their little nuclear Loom. What happens next, both within the audio drama prologue and the
first 10-15 minutes of the game itself, is fairly chaotic and does not always
make perfect sense, but does have a little of that Promethean vibe to it as
several solitary characters oppose the conservative values of the community
and rebel against the natural rhythm of Fate. The result of all that
disruption is... you, «Bobbin
Threadbare», The Chosen One, who watches the entire Guild being mysteriously
transformed into a flock of swans and evacuating the island, leaving you to
make your own journey, on which you must try to (unsuccessfully) reunite with
your brethren, (also unsuccessfully) stop a power-hungry madman from
releasing Chaos, and ultimately watch the world being torn in two halves
where you can sort of save one and leave the other one to Chaos... ...okay, to be honest, I think that the plot in its
most monumental, epic layers is not a particular achievement that Brian
Moriarty could truly be proud of. For an «out-of-the-box» type of writer,
there is really too much in Loom
conforming to classic stereotypes — such as the usual corrupt antagonist
deluding himself into thinking that he can exercise control over the
primordial Evil (I suppose that, want it or not, the entire LucasArts studio
revolving around the Indiana Jones
themes at the time did rub off on Mr. Moriarty), or the usual Chosen One Gotta Save The World Because
Those Who Are Supposed To Be Wiser Than Himself Are Really All Complete
Idiots trope. It’s all very twisted and convoluted, with an entire heap
of lore poured over your heads across the game’s less-than-two-hours playing
time, and lots of baffling internal contradictions about which you could not
even say whether they are careless plotholes or not, because the whole thing
is so short anyway that it requires your own imagination to fill those
plotholes in by definition. In other words, while Moriarty did manage to create
a somewhat unique fantasy universe based on an interesting premise (the
Guilds as the main structural cells of humanity, rather than the usual
economic and cultural add-ons as they are usually seen in everything from Dune to D&D) and an intriguingly
colorful (or, more acurately, colorless)
protagonist, he was either unable or unwilling to deliver an equally
interesting storyline that would make ample use of this premise. Over the
course of two or so hours of gameplay you manage to uncover and, if not
exactly defeat, then at least
sabotage an evil plan for world domination, but it still feels like a
slightly bloated first-draft pilot version that any movie executive would
probably return with a bored "yeah,
so?.." kind of reaction. Even the main villain has essentially one big scene all to himself and is
seemingly dealt with for good before we can properly establish his
motivation. The miracle of Loom,
therefore, is not that it has a great fantasy narrative (it does not), but
that it manages to work so well in
spite of the mediocre narrative. The dynamics of that universe do not
truly matter; what matters is its bizarre constituency — the images, the
sounds, the basic mechanics of everyday life. If the grand scheme is
disappointing — it just goes to show you that heroes are heroes and villains
are villains all over the multiverse — the peculiars are anything but. |
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Puzzles
You do, of course, communicate with other NPCs met along the way
in words — but apart from the usual «exhaust all possible dialog options»
requirement that is occasionally necessary to advance the game, everything
else in the game is achieved through the use of the protagonist’s magical
musical distaff. (To be honest, the distaff in question looks more like a
regular magical staff rather than, per definition, "a device to which a bundle of natural fibres (such as wool, flax, or
cotton) are attached for temporary storage", but since we’re talking
Guild of Weavers, clearly they couldn’t just do with a regular staff). The distaff functions as a primitive, but
powerful musical instrument, upon which the protagonist can cast series of
musical notes — each combination corresponding to a command or spell, except
that you have to learn these spells along the way, and only a few notes are
open to you from the beginning; as you progress and gain more experience,
additional notes open up, allowing for more flexibility. One could argue that this is simply a more sophisticated (and
pretentious) way of encoding the exact same commands that you used to type in
in parser-based games, or select from the list of verbs in LucasArts’ classic
early titles. Thus, producing the musical sequence E-C-E-D is essentially the
same as selecting "open"
from such a list, except that it takes more effort to remember the damn thing
and more time to execute it. But, in fact, the ability to «dissect» a command
into a sequence of notes opens up a whole new way of looking at it —
although, unfortunately, the game only capitalizes on this opportunity in one
aspect: most of these musical «drafts» work both ways, so if you need to open something by casting E-C-E-D,
this means you can close it by
casting D-E-C-E, and so on. This is something the player has to keep in mind:
the game lets you directly learn each draft only in one direction, so when
the time comes to do the right thing, you have to remember the general
principle and experiment with your drafts by casting them backwards.
(Ingeniously, those few drafts that have no imaginable «reverse» variant,
like Heal or Reflect, are encoded with palindromic note sequences). Needless to say, this musical language could have been so much
more — or, at least, could have been taken to further and further heights in
subsequent titles, had the game ever stood a chance of living on. Associating
notes with different elements, or different magical spheres, or different
emotions, etc., could have led to truly opening up a new reality for
adventure games, making your brain switch to a seriously different pathway of
encoding and decoding information. Yet there are also limits to how much
pressure the average brain of the average player can withstand — and a
serious red line between the realms of creative entertainment and educational
headache. Loom never really
crosses that line, only hinting at the true otherworldliness of the game’s
puzzle mechanics that could be; yet even that small hint is enough to
solidify the impression that you are truly navigating an alternate reality
where everything you’ve been previously used to is different. The actual puzzles are not too difficult, as there is a limited
number of «drafts» to weave and an even more limited number of hotspots on
the screen to cast them upon — even so, the player might occasionally find
oneself stumped when a certain operation requires two or more different
drafts to carry out (particularly if one or more of them are «reverse»
actions that have not been tried out previously). Fortunately, most of the
actions are fairly rational and logical (in stark contrast to something like
Monkey Island), and a few of the
puzzles are examples of simple and elegant intellectual brilliance (like the
way you have to deal with the Sheep to save them from the Dragon, or with the
Dragon herself after she abducts you instead of the Sheep). Only at the very
end of the game does the course of action start to drift into an absurdly
surreal direction, along with the plot itself, but by that time the game
practically walks you through on its own anyway. Every once in a while, you have alternate pathways to resolving
complex situations, but not too often; the game could certainly have used
more of those, as well as more red herrings and side options, just to let the
player truly taste the potentially infinite possibilities of the «musical
approach» — however, LucasArts’ stringent budgets always prevented the game
designers from going all the way, and in some respects, their «user-friendly»
approach to player interaction paid off worse than Sierra’s parser (for
instance, Sierra’s programmers did not have to bother with graphic encoding
of hotspots, at least, not until they fully embraced mouse controls).
Theoretically, you can try out any draft on any object, but most of the time
you will simply get generic failure responses. The fact that you can play the game on several levels of
difficulty — either with the notes being marked on the distaff or without any
markings, forcing you to learn and reproduce the drafts by ear — does not
make the game particularly more complicated, rather simply more tedious for
those of us without a good musical ear. In the end, it’s all about the idea
rather than its perfect realization, which, granted, would be fully
forgivable for a pioneering effort. It is the inability to capitalize on this
invention that makes me more sad than Loom’s
own limitations. |
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So perhaps the story told through Loom is confusing and trope-ridden, and the puzzles of Loom are relatively few and simple
(in spite of the groundbreaking mechanics of their realization) — but even
so, there was nothing else like Loom
back in 1990, and from a certain viewpoint, there is still nothing else like Loom even today. Of course, fantasy world building was
hardly a new thing in video gaming after ten years of Ultimas, King’s Quests,
and Might And Magics; however, in
the Sierra On-Line vs. LucasArts-dominated adventure game market, a
full-fledged original fantasy universe with its own lore and ideology was, at
that time, still a relative rarity — such things were usually thought of as
the RPG domain, and RPGs were still strategically-oriented experiences rather
than the cinematic mastodons they would become in the next century (see
something like Ultima VI or Might And Magic 3, released around
the same time as Loom, for
comparison). Although
all of LucasArts’ own previous games could technically qualify as «fantasy»,
they weren’t really high fantasy — most of them expanded either on
pre-existing universes (Indiana Jones;
the Caribbean pirate fantasy of Monkey
Island) or on pre-existing cartoonish tropes (Maniac Mansion with its «mad scientist lab» setting). By
contrast, Loom was neither parodic
by nature nor directly based on somebody else’s foundation. Instead, it was a
brief, but fulfilling fantasy Odyssey, taking the player through at least
four visually and atmospherically different realms before uniting them in a
single fate. But even better than that, it was a bit of a psychological,
melancholic, slightly sentimental Odyssey, one that actually invited you to identify
with its character and see the world through his «mystic eyes», rather than
just use him — like King Graham — as a mechanical vehicle to guide you
through its vistas and puzzles. After
all, when a game opens to the proverbially romantic sounds of Tchaikovsky and
a dazzling vista of seaside cliffs under a multi-colored sunset — and when the very first action you,
the player, are free to make by contemplating a lonely brown leaf hanging
from a nearby barren branch, with the sad laconic commentary "Last leaf of the year..." as it
slowly topples to the ground, never to be seen again, well, one might argue
that there is already more atmosphere in those opening few seconds than in
most preceding or contemporary games. Oddest of all is the protagonist: cloaked,
hooded, with indigo-blue eyes intensely peering out of an unseen face, like
some sort of Invisible Man, but armed with mystery instead of mischief. We
did play for somebody visually similar in Sierra’s Manhunter series from around the same time period, but the
protagonist in those games did not have much by way of personality.
Meanwhile, Bobbin Threadbare is essentially a child in his formative years —
a little naïve, somewhat smart, very inquisitive, and just a trifle
sarcastic — and this combination of uncomfortably spooky appearance with a
sensitive and empathetic nature is quite startling. The
inquisitiveness comes in handy once Bobbin learns of his destiny and sets off
on his personal Odyssey. The initial setting of the game — the Weavers’ Guild
itself — is somewhat of a cross between a Northern tribal settlement (all
those yurts set up on the shore) and an ancient Greek pastiche (upon entering
one of the yurts, you somehow end up in a temple with majestic columns and
all the works). From there, Bobbin transitions to the Guild of Glassmakers,
all of it Emerald City-green and elegantly futuristic; the Guild of
Shepherds, all predictably pastoral and united with Nature; and the Guild of
Blacksmiths, industrial as hell to its red-and-gold core. Bobbin’s
interactions with all of those environments and the people representing them
are usually laconic, but he does manage to make at least one new friend in
each, and through their short cutscenes they even manage to establish their
own personalities — the Wise Advisor from the Glassmakers, the Sweet Young
Potentially Romantic Interest from the Shepherds, and the Young Boy Sidekick
from the Blacksmiths. (They never really get to fulfill their actual
functions, but we can all dream on). All
of these locations and characters feel strangely wispy and dreamy, more like
symbols or allegories of something than actual agents of the plot, and
together with the music, this really makes Loom feel more like an allegorical dream than a proper
legendary-hero-saves-the-world piece of fantasy. Very rarely do you actually
experience a sense of concrete purpose while playing — yes, you know that
technically you are searching for the swan-transformed members of your Guild,
but you barely understand why they were transformed, you have no idea where
they are, and most of the time you’re too busy solving other problems anyway.
You solve puzzles, learn and use musical drafts, talk to people, sometimes
trick people, and your own motives in all this usually remain vague and
confusing. Maybe this was unintentional — maybe Moriarty just kept stumbling
and groping in the dark himself — but as far as I’m concerned, he did achieve
the finest result of them all: where others would have generated sheer nonsense, he somehow produced mystique. Do not
be mistaken, though: Loom is not a
cuddly one for the kiddies. Bobbin Threadbare may exude a child-like
innocence, but there is a crucial scene in the game when his jailer,
intrigued by tales of the Weavers, demands to look at his unhooded face in
exchange for a favor, which Bobbin rather casually agrees to. We never know —
other than an off-screen scream — what ensued and in which particular way the
jailer did confirm the «no man can see my face and live» legend of Bobbin’s
ilk, but we can certainly tell it wasn’t pretty. (Note: in the inferior talkie version of the game, as well as in
the bonus addendum to the original if you played on the hardest level, you could see what happened, and it was a
little disappointing). Bishop Mandible, too, is quite viscerally eliminated
by Chaos — and then there are all of Bobbin’s friends who end up dead or at
least disembodied by Chaos and his minions. Much of this was terrifying by
1990’s standards, and with a little immersion, some of it can still feel
terrifying even today. The borders between gorgeous fantasy dream and bloody
nightmare are really thin here, though, fortunately, the nightmare aspects
are never realistic enough to become properly traumatic. Returning
to what I started out with in the opening paragraphs — about how certain
things can only work well in a retrospectively antiquated setting — all of this weird atmospherics is only
kept alive by the laconic and (unintentionally) «primitive» character of the
game. Bobbin’s short replicas; the general brevity of the game’s dialogs; the
relative quickness with which the player travels from one area of the world
to another; the overall simplicity of the puzzles — what all these qualities
do is they kill off any possibility of «pretentiousness» or taking this whole
thing more seriously and realistically than it should deserve. (A major
reason why the talkie version of the game works worse than the silent
version, which I shall explain more in the Sound part of the review). Instead, the sparseness and primitiveness
emphasizes the game’s «dream» nature, as well as its child-like properties. There
is, indeed, a lot that Bobbin Threadbare and his much luckier contemporary,
Guybrush Threepwood, have in common — the famous "ask me about LOOM"
running gag of Monkey Island is
not merely a fortunate chronological coincidence — such as their combination
of wit and naivete, kindness and sarcasm, insatiable curiosity about the
strange world(s) surrounding them, and occasionally childish behavior. But
Guybrush, for all his attractiveness, is a meta-parodic post-modern
character, whose primary function is to deconstruct the surreal
reconstruction of the universe around him. Bobbin has no such mission; his
ordeal is to fix things rather than tear them apart, though greater forces at
play eventually show him the futility of all this small-scale work. In fact,
if you sit back and start overthinking the effect of the game, Loom eventually takes on the form of
a great tragic metaphor — the story of an innocent kid who wants to do simple
good in the world, but ends up as a cogwheel in the hands of its evil
masterminds, or just as a helpless victim of Fate. This is really more
Oedipus than Guybrush Threepwood — given all those subtle references to Greek
mythology in the Weavers’ Guild, I’m sure the analogy must have been right
there in Moriarty’s mind. Looking
over this section one more time, I fear that it came out confused and
confusing, but that is very much in keeping with the game itself, so I’ll
probably leave it like it is. It does
take a sensitive and discriminating approach to perceive Loom as a one-of-a-kind tiny romantic gem lost on the vast
prairies of digital fantasy worlds; players who are more concerned with vast
amounts and internal coherence of lore might very well find themselves
frustrated and disappointed. But perhaps when the world finally crashes and
burns and all you have left is a couple hours’ worth of electricity for your
PC, booting up Loom might be a
suitably appropriate way of saying goodbye. |
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Technical features |
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The original Loom was
published as a DOS game in early 1990, at which time it was still limited to
16-color EGA graphics. That version, simplified and pixellated, is still
available and very much playable; however, comparing it with the CD-ROM-based
VGA versions that came out for FM Towns (in 1991) and then again for DOS (in
1992) leaves little doubt in my mind that the game works much better with 256
colors than it does with 16, and that it simply had to be downgraded
originally due to budget limitations. (VGA titles for DOS did not begin to
ship properly until late 1990, I
believe — King’s Quest V, one of
the first groundbreakers, came out in November, with Sierra always being at
the forefront of graphic innovation — but the VGA standard itself had been
introduced as early as 1987; it simply took some time for it to reach the
mass market). I
have come across more than a few remarks from veteran players about how the
original 16-color version of Loom
actually looks better than the VGA rendering, and all I can say to that is
that nostalgia is a hell of a bitch. Here, for instance, is a screenshot from
the early AMIGA version (same EGA as the DOS version) corresponding to the
one from the VGA version reproduced above:
You
can certainly see here how the artists honestly tried to convey the strangeness and «warped reality» of the
universe here with 16 colors — the interaction of the various blue components
in the sky section, combined with the subtle gradations of unbroken and
dotted lines on the horizon, is impressive, as is the stand-out of the
reddish «last leaf of the year» against the overall cold blue patterns of
trees, rocks, and the seascape. But it has nothing on the corresponding VGA
image, which is just a perfect example of the early days of «scenery porn» if
there ever was one. In there, we actually see a gorgeous sunset, reflecting purple on the water and casting a
rainbowish perspective on the entire horizon. The rocks are gray and barren,
while the trees next to them have an odd deep purple glow — not even clear if
that is their natural color or if it is all a trick of the very special light cast on the world
of the Weavers. Admittedly,
I deviate here from the opinion of Brian Moriarty himself,
who, like the honorable purist he wants to be, defends the EGA version to the
death, pointing out how its visual creativity could not even begin to exist
with the technical limitations it had to circumvent. He believes that the
limited color palette was a major bonus to Loom’s atmosphere — that, for instance, if we see all of the
Weavers’ Guild in different shades of blue, with none of those yellow or red
additions, it probably adds to our impression of it as a cold, dark, sinister
location. But why should it be so? The Weavers’ Guild has no obligation to be
wedged in some sort of frozen tundra, nor does it have to give out a 100%
impression of impending death. By adding more colors and skilfully mixing
them, the VGA version succeeds in making the universe of Loom a more vibrant place on the whole, and, where possible, an
even stranger place than it looked like in the original version. I can
certainly understand Moriarty’s bitterness about the fact that the VGA
remasters were made without his supervision, but that does not exactly
elevate his rants above the status of «petty bickering». (The complaints
about cutting out the original game’s content in the «talkie» version, on the
other hand — now that is something
I can get behind; we’ll talk more about it in the Sound section). Anyway,
one thing that both the EGA and VGA versions do have in common — arguably the
single most important visual touch in the game — is the stark color contrast
between the different Guilds. After all those deep blue and purple hues of
the Weavers, Bobbin makes his way to the Glassmakers’ Guild, which is all
about different shades of green, coloring assorted futuristic geometric
shapes — the realm of cutting edge technology! — then it’s off to the
Shepherds, where the landscape, obviously, is also green, but a more natural
shape thereof — then there’s the industrially-tinged Blacksmiths’ Guild, all
about different shades of red and yellow and black (even the skyline is red!)
— and, then, finally, there’s the island and castle of Bishop Mandible, again
returning to green, but this time in a sickly, rotting corpse-like shade of
green. Then, of course, Chaos takes over, and it’s all about a pervasive
blackness threatening to engulf all those lively (or not so lively) colors.
In the end, there is probably more color symbolism in this game than just
about anything produced in any video game up to that point; you could write a
whole thesis on the subtle coloring nuances in the EGA and VGA versions. Finally,
one more seductive aspect of the visuals are the close-up portraits for
different characters: whenever one of them gets an unusually long piece of
soliloquy, the overall perspective is replaced by a face (slightly animated,
though usually just with two or three different frames). This is important,
since character sprites in the game are, as was usual for the epoch, nothing
to write home about, and the portraits do a good job of bringing the various
NPCs back to life. Needless to say, these guys, too, look much better in their
VGA versions than in 16 colors. Special prize goes to Steve Purcell for
making all the Weavers look distinct from each other despite having no faces
— sheerly through the different expressions of their uniformly blue eyes
(inquisitive, pleading, threatening, it’s all in there). This was actually
LucasArts’ first serious experience in the digital portrait craft (with The Secret Of Monkey Island heavily
stepping on its tail), and they immediately bested their chief competitor at
it — in Sierra On-Line, close-up portraits of characters had been introduced
as early as in Leisure Suit Larry
(for, uhm, fairly crucial reasons), but up until that time, they rarely had
the same level of expressivity. With
this additional icing on the cake, it is no wonder that Loom, be it in its original EGA incarnation or the redrawn VGA
version, remains an unchallenged masterpiece in the visual art department if
we’re talking late Eighties / early Nineties. Put it on a 1920x1080 modern
screen, or even on a 4K one, and it still looks classy, even with all the
pixellation. |
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Sound
And yet, video games are not like any other medium, meaning that
on the whole, the choice of Swan Lake
was not just totally appropriate — it was pretty much a perfect choice on Moriarty’s part. Arranged by George Sanger
(who, within LucasArts, was previously responsible for the NES version of Maniac Mansion), the MIDI melodies
sound lush, resplendent, and just about ideal for complementing the «magical
reality» of Loom’s universe. While
the story of the game does not really have much in common with the narrative
of Swan Lake, apart from the swan
transformation motif itself, the fairy-tale setting clearly does. But perhaps
the most important function of the musical backgrounds — which, as was common
with LucasArts games at the time, play all through your gaming time unless you
decide to turn the music off — is that it alleviates and dissipates any fear,
unease, or discomfort you might experience while wandering through these
strange lands. Even when the game is at its most (officially) terrifying,
after the appearance of Chaos, the music never lets you forget that you are
enclosed in a fairy-tale dream rather than a grim virtual reality with
emphasis on reality. Had the composer been told to create an actual new soundtrack for the game, taking
his cues from John Williams or any lesser contemporary figure, he would
probably strive to adapt the melodic arrangements to their respective
environments — for instance, come up with something «tribal» and
«ritualistic» for the exteriors of the Weavers’ Guild, something harshly
«industrial» for the Blacksmiths’ Guild, and something «spooky» or «martial»
for the sections involving Chaos. Instead, the challenge was to find the most
suitable themes from the ballet for each sequence in the game — a challenge
that is impossible to stand up to perfectly by definition, but whose very
imperfections can result in unpredictable, out-of-the-blue mood swings that
might end up giving the game more character than taking from it. So maybe the
already mentioned match between Little
Swans and the Glassmakers’ Guild feels weird; but using Pas de trois for the main theme of the
Weavers’ Guild makes a fine contrast with the relatively dreary-looking
landscape and gray yurts of the Weavers, constantly reminding the player
that, despite the deceptively drab surroundings, you really find yourself in
a place of delicious magic. Of course, to ensure the proper experience, you have to
experience the soundtrack at its fullest and mightiest; early versions won’t
do, and even the original Roland MT-32 recordings for the PC sound rather feeble
and whiny. This
version, taken from the 1991 FM Towns edition of the game, is arguably the
richest in texture, which automatically means that the FM Towns version is
the one most recommended for any retro playthroughs (it is unclear why anyone
would want to listen to the soundtrack on its own, though, other than a
one-time curiosity... well, to be fair, I’m not sure why anyone would want to
listen to Swan Lake on its own
anyway, be it a classical recording or a MIDI conversion, but feel free to
dismiss this feeling as a side effect of typical Russian snobbery). The FM Towns version does lack the feature that many modern
gamers would find welcoming — voiced dialogue, which would only be added a
year later for the DOS CD version. Unfortunately, as nice as it would have
been to hear Loom voiced properly, this was not the case;
budget limitations caused only a small part of the game’s script (which was
not all that large to begin with)
to be provided with voiceovers, meaning that many lines were simply cut out
of the game. The voiceovers themselves were not terrible (as people sometimes describe them in retrospective),
but rather ordinary, submitted
mostly by a bunch of no-names who delivered their lines, got paid, and went
home — detracting from the game’s magic rather than adding to it. To be
frank, even Indiana Jones And The Fate
Of Atlantis, also released in 1992, featured a more convincing voice cast
despite LucasArts’ relative inexperience with the technology. This is why, in the end, I think that the FM Towns version of
the game is definitive: it has the juicy reworked VGA graphics, the complete
(text) dialogue, and the richest
musical accompaniment — without the
generally dull voiceovers. This does not mean that the game could never have
worked with voicing; it’s just that back in 1992, voice acting in video games
was still in its infancy. Both Sierra and LucasArts would not score their
first true voiced masterpieces until one year later (this would be,
respectively, Gabriel Knight: Sins Of
The Fathers and Day Of The
Tentacle); Loom ended up being
merely the training grounds for the studio, and the actors, who probably
never played the original silent version and had no contact with the game’s
original designer, never got to really get inside Loom’s
one-of-a-kind universe. Which, in the end, is not very surprising: Loom is a game explicitly designed
for the pre-talk era of video games, and trying to voice it was much like
those few failed attempts at transforming a silent movie into a «talkie»
around 1929–1930. |
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This last section of the evaluation is going to be very short:
talking about Loom’s gameplay
interface and mechanics is barely possible because the game has none. Well, at least in its earliest
part, when Bobbin is still geting his bearings around the Weavers’ Guild — at
best, all you can do is click your mouse on various hotspots, some of which
will give you a slightly enlarged image of an object in the bottom right
corner of the screen, accompanied with a short general description. That is all you get for a while. No parser, no
list of verbal commands (the most typical interface for LucasArts at the
time), no way to operate on or interact with any details of the environment.
Pretty sure that those players who were too lazy to read the manual (usually,
that includes most of us, doesn’t it?) temporarily ended up stumped, asking
themselves if they’d accidentally picked up a buggy copy of the software. Once you pick up your distaff, about 10 or so minutes into the
game, things change — there is your interface at the bottom of the screen,
consisting of... your distaff. If you’re playing on Expert mode, this is the
only thing you see — a stick, various parts of which you have to click in
order to trigger different notes (by ear!). If you’re on lower difficulties,
you’ll also see an accompanying musical staff (no pun intended), making
things a little easier. You don’t even have any inventory: Bobbin is allowed
to handle one on-screen object or person at a time, and carries absolutely
nothing except for the distaff (perhaps this is somehow meant to reflect a
specific type of stoicism common to the Weavers?). This record-setting minimalism (for an adventure game, at least)
does carry a toll in that the game becomes extremely easy to beat, as long as
you meticulously pay your pixel-hunting dues (not too difficult, since the
number of hotspots is seriously limited as well) and diligently jot down all
the musical drafts uncovered on your journey. But challenging the player was
hardly a big priority for Moriarty in the first place — his prime ambition
was to offer the player a brand new language
of interaction, mastering which would become a challenge in itself. And since
Loom, metaphorically speaking,
represents the «childhood» stage of Bobbin Threadbare, it stands to reason
that its musical language also barely advances beyond the «childhood» stage —
even though already at this juncture, it shows you signs of linguistic
creativity when you have to understand and employ in practice the principle
of «draft reversal», producing patterns that nobody explicitly taught you
before by applying analogy and just a little bit of semantics. If I’m cracking this right, any sequel to Loom would have probably featured a slightly more complex and
advanced interface — representing the «adolescent» or «adult» stage compared
to the «toddler» state of the first game — perhaps not merely limiting itself
to more specific drafts, but thinking of ways to weave them together into
more intricate patterns or something of the sort. Alas, with Moriarty’s
universe pretty much «throttled in the cradle» before it could be fully
developed, we can only guess where such a path could have ultimately led. |
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If you have never
played Loom and somehow this
review ends up stimulating you into getting it and playing it and you end up
disappointed and bored, well, there’s nothing to be ashamed of. Some works of
art make an immediate impression, while others require a modicum of
self-nudging — which may or may not be worth the effort, depending on how you
feel about it. And Loom requires
quite a bit of self-nudging, even outside of the fact that it looks back at
you out of 1990, an age in which digital fantasy universes commonly required
you to fill in the gaps from your own mind, providing more of a stimulus for
imagination than a self-sufficient picture. The worst mistake you can make
about Loom, though, is to treat it
like any other story-driven video game — that is, judge it on the merits of
the complexity and originality of its plot (not a wise solution) or on the
sophistication level of its gameplay mechanics and puzzles (definitely not a wise solution). First
and foremost, Loom is a series of
interwoven visions, combining text, graphics, and music to paint an alternate
reality that you investigate through the blue eyes of your own impenetrable
ghost-child alter ego. Where every other adventure game before Loom used the environment as a
setting for puzzle-solving and role-playing, Loom is the environment
— and your psychological reaction to being part of it. It is the very first
game in the adventure genre (perhaps the very first game, period?) that actually tried to put
the Art into the «art» of videogames; I certainly wonder what the late Roger
Ebert would have to say about this one if they showed it to him instead of
all those really
dubious examples from Kellee Santiago. Of course, in the end Loom is only a faint glimmer of what
could have been — the computer game analogy of a hypothetical 5-year piano
prodigy who tragically died of measles the next week after delighting his
first big audience at Carnegie Hall. But it is still a unique faint glimmer, a tiny peek through a particular doorway
that has never been enlarged or flung open after the death of the initial
project. Up to this day, it retains its weird status of «obvious artistic
influence for game designers to be influenced by», except that no future game
designer has created anything like it; the world has moved on, and those
particular kinds of mushrooms that would let Alice shrink in size and pass
through Brian Moriarty’s half-open door have not been on the market in
decades. Who knows, though: perhaps in our current age of ever-diminishing
returns, when fresh ideas and approaches seem to be more scarce than the oil
at the bottom of a 100-year old Texan well, some modern day Indiana Jones
might eventually resume the search for those elusive fungi?.. |
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