July's Retro Game Club pick! Old PC games are a huge blind spot for me, especially point and click adventure games outside of the Humungous sphere. I figured I wasn't super into them due to their reputation for fiddly gotchas, but it's a game club pick and the concept sounded too cool not to check out. In Loom, skilled artisan guilds have honed their crafts to the point of becoming wizards, and as a Weaver you are able to weave magical music with your trusty distaff. Spells are music notes, in sets of four to match the four-step process of using a loom, and played by either clicking different parts of your staff on the status bar or typing the corresponding keys on your keyboard. The spells you can learn run the gamut from opening things to twisting things to turning them green, and you generally learn them from self-demonstrating elements of nature. Loom is stuffed with delightful thematic resonance and despite its short length cultivates a thoughtful fantasy world, especially if you listen to the audio drama establishing the protagonist's origin first.
I have a mild musical background so I decided to play on Expert mode, which removes all musical notation from the game except for the distaff itself and forces you to play by ear. I actually didn't even look at the game on other difficulties so I'm not sure how substantial the differences are, but I had a great time noting down every arrangement of notes I heard and hoping I recorded the correct notes when I wasn't yet able to play the songs myself to verify. You start the game only able to play three notes of an eight note C scale, learning more as you progress, and there aren't ever any accidentals, so I would hope this game was pretty accessible to everybody with an interest.
What really blew my mind was the final puzzle of the starting island, where you have to realize you can play a song backwards to reverse its effects!! A simple twist, for a puzzle where you need to untwist something hehe. Unfortunately the rest of the game never had anything that approached that eureka moment, but it more than kept pace with the frankly astounding pixel art on display. I played the original EGA version of the game and there were multiple screens where I had to stop to just take it in for a moment.
Game Number: 54
Year Played: 2025
Platform: MS-DOS