LOOM™

One of the most unique adventures ever made, Loom is a brainchild of Brian Moriarty (the brain behind Infocom's Wishbringer and Trinity). The game's intriguing plot is enough to ensure its "classic" status: You are Bobbin Threadbare, the mysterious "Loom child" and member of the Weaver Guild who must embark on a perilous journey to follow his guild members who were turned into Swans and flew away from the Loom island. Moriarty raised the game's originality even higher by giving us no inventory. Instead, all puzzles in the game are based on "spells" cast by playing notes on a magical staff. Definitely a must-have for all adventure enthusiasts. To get you in the right frame of mind and set up the story, the designers included a thirty-minute cassette recording that features a superbly acted and relevant docu-drama that sets the tone of the game. The original CD version of the audio drama was limited to 1,000 copies and offered as a promotional item to attendees of the Loom launch party, held at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, January 1990. Sadly, the audio drama is not included with the GOG release and while having the background story is not strictly necessary, I tracked down the Lossless/Flac CD version here: mega.nz/file/ctQQHYxL#lxxbPoawlOi9awVboqxTWEzgojcq37qWNA3WPoVb9iA This seems to be a later CD version released in Japan as the audio prolog is found both in Japanese as track #1 and English as track #2 and then continues like the ltd ed: Tracklist 01 - Loom 29:24 02 - The Weavers 06:16 03 - Flight of the Swan 01:25 04 - Bobbin 02:28 05 - The Seventeenth Visit 01:29

but the ending will leave you a little bitter and sad.

I grew up on old games like this. Sierra, Westwood and LucasArts made a lot of great point-and-click adventures, and this one is no exception. The music is beautiful and fitting to the scene, the graphics (though dated now) are beautiful and inviting, and the voice acting is not bad at all. One refreshing thing about this particular point-n-click is the lack of a real inventory system, and no real "verb menu". No look, take, walk, etc. buttons, just click and double click. In place of a personal inventory, you use different spells you learn and jot down for each playthrough. (Some are known to be random for different playthoughs) While it does keep a rather serious tone, not having near the goofy comedy from Sam and Max or Monkey Island, it does have its charm, with an almost Terry Pratchett-esque dry wit. All in all, if you're looking for a classic from a legendary time in PC gaming, do not miss this one.

Loom is a very interesting game, it definitely got that LucasArts/LucasFilm charm but at the same time.. doesn't the game feel a bit like Zork and other Infocom titles? No surprises there as the creator and lead developer of the game was Brian Moriarty, former of Infocom. The game definitely stands out compared to other titles from LucasArts, mainly due to it's interesting take on the SCUMM system. Rather than using the classic point n click menu and an inventory, you use the weaver stick to uhh I guess sing your commands... it's unique and it's great! There's no real issues remembering the various notes as long as you write them down. However the story itself is... quite dull tbh. Pretty much your standard fantasy story if anything. And of course compared to other titles from LucasArts, this game is a tad more serious. Definitely recommending it for all point n click fans!

Game itself is an older point-and-click adventure as noted in the other reviews. I will say that for the Linux install experience, despite it being a ScummVM-based game, I was suprised that the latest offline installer (loom_en_gog_2_20099.sh) did not work for me out-of-the-box (ScummVM has been around for a long time and is pretty stable in my opinion). Oddly, I also have The Dig on GOG (another ScummVM game), and that one did work just fine out-of-the-box. I'm on Fedora 37 rather than Ubuntu so possibly there were some newer system libraries on my OS than what the game was expecting. In any case, if you find yourself in a similar situation, you can resolve this easily by bypassing the including scummvm install and using your distro's scummvm package instead. First install scummvm through your distro's package manager, then under the game's install directory use a text editor to edit 1 line in the file support/gog_com.shlib : you'll want to change the last line of the run_scummvm function (line 170 for me) to use /usr/bin/scummvm instead of ./scummvm/scummvm - but leave all the arguments the same, only change the path. After making these changes, the game ran fine for me. Audio worked, etc.