Amiga Power


Loom
By Kixx XL
Amiga 500

 
Published in Amiga Power #30

Loom

When you think of the most glamorous and exotic trades and professions, what is it that springs to mind? Medicine's always a good one, isn't it? There's plenty of appeal in the romantic image of the healer. I always thought that a lutemaker was something special too - imagine being able to make musical instruments as well as play them. I never, in my most bizarre imaginings, thought of a weaver. At the end of the day, a piece of cloth is just a piece of cloth (I don't care if it's a really fancy bit of elaborate tapestry, it's still a bit of old cloth) and weaving it, no matter how skilled a craft it may be, isn't in the least bit romantic.

Strange, then, that Loom should feature, as its central theme, weaving. It's easy to see how the idea could have come about - there they all were, at the end of the evening, trying to work out whether they should do the washing up or open the brandy, when a slurred voice said "Hey, man, have you ever thought about the term 'spell weaving'? I mean, like, wouldn't it be funny, right, if, like, when you cast a spell in a game, you actually had to, like, weave it, man?" And so a game was born.

For all that, though, it's really rather splendid. It's a Lucasfilm point-and-click adventure with exquisite graphics and a rather entertaining structure which prevents you from being killed out of the game. If you foul up, you foul up, and you get another chance to have a go at solving the puzzle. It was, they claim, designed to be finished. If only life were like that.

I was chatting to the famous Tim Tucker the other day, and we came to the conclusion that if there was a magazine in Heaven it would look like Amiga Power. I'd like to add to that the suggestion that, if there are adventure games in Heaven, they'll probably be written by those nice people at Lucasfilm/Lucasarts/whatever they are now.

The Bottom Line

A really rather splendid little adventure game, even if it is centred around the rather prosaic art of weaving.

Tim Norris

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