How to be a videogame tester

This week, were taking a look at a TRS-80 text adventure of uncertain provenance -- I havent been able to track down an author, but Alexis Adventure was published in the January 1983 issue of the cassette-based CLOAD magazine.  Its a fairly straightforward adventure based on Greek history and mythology.  As Alexis V of Xanthus, we must reclaim our fathers crown by escaping jail, traveling to four other islands, finding the Crystal Sphere, raising an army, and battling General Tarkaan, usurper of the throne.


Alexis Adventure is written in BASIC, and competently executed, though the parser is occasionally obstructive and a few of the puzzles dont readily present themselves as such.  Theres also one situation that can occur randomly and forces a complete restart, as the game has no SAVE command.  But its not unsophisticated -- the text is in upper and lowercase (something of a rarity for the era), and theres even an unexpected twist to the game mechanics at the end.

I encourage interested readers to sample Alexis independently before proceeding with my comments, as always -- but in this case I must add an additional caveat.  This adventure is actually self-spoiling, as it displays all the locations, objects and verbs onscreen while its building its database!  So if you really want to avoid any giveaways, close your eyes for about twenty seconds after getting past the instructions.  And if youve played the game already, or dont intend to, feel free to march your faithful soldiers into the...

***** SPOILERS AHEAD! *****





Our hero starts out in a jail cell, holding a small pouch, which very conveniently contains a skeleton key.  The engine is slightly cumbersome -- while each room starts out with a Scott Adams-style display, the room description eventually scrolls off and does not refresh without a LOOK.  So when we OPEN POUCH, we see something interesting, but EXAMINE POUCH just tells us that It looks like a small pouch.  We have to LOOK at the room to see that the act of opening the pouch dropped the skeleton key on the floor.  And, as is sometimes the case in hobbyist-created adventure games, if we OPEN POUCH a second time the key is spirited out of our possession and back onto the floor.

There are quite a few locations in this game, but there isnt much for us to do in most of them.  We can explore the great city on the island of Xanthus, behold a valley where many battles were fought, and find the palace gates where a suspicious guard will not let us pass. But there are no objects of interest here -- all we can really do is make our way to the dock and board a sailing ship, the Xenophon, which fortunately we are free to command.

The sailing navigation is rather odd -- it seems to be semi-random, and doesnt force us to stay inside what seems to be a local 9 x 9 grid; some confusion results from the games announcement of "Land!" whenever were near an island, without telling us which of the games five islands it might be or in which direction we can see it.  In general, Xanthus is to the north, Tripolis to the east, Hyklos to the far north, Skiros to the southeast, and Ikaria to the southwest .  We have to watch the weather -- we can end our journey by drowning in bad conditions, and this is somewhat random; it can even occur on our first move out of dock, so this can be fatal and game-restarting.  Other than that glitch, we are free to travel the archipelago, visiting and returning to each island at will (assuming we can find our way there and back.)

On Tripolis, we can acquire a witch doctors mask.  There are angry natives in the village, and a cave with a portcullis and a suspiciously placed skull.  We can PULL SKULL (not TAKE or TURN it) to reveal a passage.  Inside we find a faded scroll, containing hieroglyphics (arent those usually Egyptian?) telling of "the treasure of the shores of Skiros."  Past the scroll we encounter an angry native armed with a spear; we can do the obvious and WEAR MASK, which frightens the poor fellow into running away, dropping his spear.

The cave also contains some magical phosphorescent light which we can simply TAKE with us, and a catapult.  We cant GO or USE or ENTER or FIRE the catapult, it seems, or CATAPULT ME.  Examination reveals that it has an ammunition chamber, and a lever.  Hmmmm.

The island of Hyklos hosts a very dark cavern, so the phosphorescent light we picked up on Tripolis is important.  Inside is the river Styx, and Charon, the traditional boatman.  He wont let us on the boat -- we probably need a coin, per tradition.  Well have to come back here.

The island of Skiros has shores populated by tropical trees.  We can CLIMB TREE and TAKE BANANAS there, but getting down is more of a challenge -- CLIMB DOWN and CLIMB TREE do not work, but for some reason going N does.  The site of a recent forest fire yields charred pottery, still full of hot coals which ought to be useful for igniting something.  A giant gorilla guards a map on the islands summit; we cant GIVE him the bananas, but if we drop them hell take them and leave.  The map thus obtained is no help for ocean navigation, but shows us a trail through a rockslide somewhere in the games world.  I tried to DIG for treasure all over the island, even though I had no special tools for doing so; I got no error responses, but still came up empty.  Theres also a wall of vines covering a passage to the south; we can BURN VINES with the hot coals to make our way inside.  Here we find a sword of sharpness (unlike those cheap swords of dullness, apparently.)

The island of Ikaria contains the massive rockslide the map is supposed to help us with.  The tidepools along the coast contain a huge oyster.  We can simply OPEN OYSTER (with the sword of sharpness, apparently) to reveal a giant pearl, and leave the poor creature as an annihilated oyster.  Theres also a pickaxe available along another shore.  With the map from Skiros in hand, we can... well, we cant GO ROCKSLIDE, or walk N into it, or USE MAP or FOLLOW MAP.  But we can GO TRAIL to find a sheltered cove, where the fabled Cyclops lives, though perhaps not particularly lavishly, as he looks hungry.  We cant KILL CYCLOPS -- no real surprise there -- and he doesnt want the oyster.  And if we hang around too long, our hero gets eaten, so thats not useful for our purposes.

Going back to Xanthus, we can try to KILL GUARD outside the place, which gets us thrown back in jail... though none of our possessions are confiscated, it appears.  Can we use the catapult on Tripolis?  Yes, we can INSERT SPEAR - In 1 word, where will you insert it? - CATAPULT to load it into the long, narrow ammunition chamber.  We PULL LEVER, and it fires but... hits nothing.  At least we can retrieve the spear, now lying on the ground, and re-load.  I assumed it would have more range... aha!  The catapult is itself portable -- I was picturing something more substantial, I think the author is actually thinking of a crossbow.

Now we can kill the Cyclops with the catapult and spear, and take his eye as a trophy.  We cant go anywhere beyond the Cyclops lair, though, so what else is there to do?  We can go back to Tripolis to check out the angry natives.  We cant SHOW EYE or WAVE EYE or DROP EYE to impress them.  What about the treasure on Skiros mentioned by the faded scroll?  Now that we have the pickaxe, we can DIG and get a different response at our landing site -- we find a collection of gold coins.

Lets see if Charon will take a coin now, in the cave on Hyklos.  Its a bit of a parser struggle, but GO FERRY takes care of the details, and we soon find ourselves on the other side of the Styx, where a three-headed wolf (probably a relative of Cerberus) blocks the way south.  We can KILL WOLF, and the sword of sharpness handily dispatches the creature.  To the south we find ourselves in Hell, where Pluto holds reign and the crystal sphere is visible. 

It gets a little bit interesting here -- I think the author was trying to design an unpredictable puzzle, but if weve inadvertently anticipated that by carrying both the eye of the Cyclops and the oyster from Ikaria, the logic gets a little muddled.  If we try to TAKE SPHERE, Pluto sees that you have the eye of the Cyclops, so he wants you to bring him the giant pearl of Ikaria instead.  These underworld figures are always so deceptive and demanding!  And even after we open the oyster weve been carrying, he still sees the eye and wont accept the pearl.  We have to DROP EYE and then TAKE SPHERE, at which point the Lord of the Underworld will ignore the alternative lying on the ground, at last allowing us to give him the pearl in exchange for the sphere.  The generic EXAMINE handler is disappointing here -- EXAMINE PLUTO yields only, It looks like Pluto - god of the underworld.

Now we must pay Charon for passage back to the other side of the Styx, and work on raising our army.  The valley on Xanthus now shows 144 soldiers under General Tarkaans command.  They seem to be waiting for us to join the battle, but we have no soldiers and cant recruit any here.  Back to Tripolis we go, where the formerly angry natives are now bowing and worshipping us as we have the fabled Crystal Sphere in hand.  They happily join the cause, and we now (in my playthrough) have 174 soldiers in inventory -- lets hope their greater numbers are a match for Tarkaans well-trained and equipped troops.

Somehow all of our Tripolean fighters fit on the Xenophon, and we can return to the valley on Xanthus.  And suddenly, the game shifts modes -- its no longer an adventure game, but a simple strategy exercise:



We can choose from four different tactics -- Defensive fortification, Frontal attack, Flanking maneuvers, and Encirclement of the enemy.  Option #4, Encirclement, seems like a good choice, and it is -- since we have more soldiers, and can apparently move into surrounding positions quickly, Tarkaans forces are quickly disposed of.   If a tactic isnt working out, we can retreat and change our approach before we lose any more soldiers, but in truth the battles development seems pretty random and the outcome is largely determined by the size of each sides forces.  I retried the battle several times, and all four options worked fine for me with the numeric advantage I had.  The code randomizes the number of soldiers on each side, between 125 and 225, so I may just have lucked out when the digital dice were rolled.

With Tarkaans forces defeated, Alexis can walk through the unguarded palace gates, TAKE CROWN, WEAR CROWN... and victory is ours!




The length of Alexis Vs reign is based on how long it takes us to finish the game -- I only got 8 years out of him, but the ocean navigation tends to take up a lot of moves while we try to find our way to the right island.  Im content with eight good years -- after all, thats as much as any U.S. President can ever get.  The CLOAD adventure games dont have the consistency of similar series, like the SoftSide adventures, but this one provided good value back in the day, and was fun to revisit through in 2012.

This week, we're looking at another text adventure from Bob "Captain 80" Liddil's company, The Programmer's Guild -- Tower of Fear, written by Charles Forsythe and published circa 1981 when the TRS-80 Color Computer was the new machine on the block.  Forsythe started out on the black-and-white TRS-80 Model I, and here he indulges in a little color graphics display as the game boots up:



The Tower of Fear parser has a limited vocabulary, but it implements a couple of Infocom-style assumption mechanisms and performs well -- Forsythe always worked in machine language, and there are no visible delays slowing play.  And his engine uses a green-on-black text display rather than the CoCo's default black-on-green mode, which feels a little more "professional" somehow.

I began playing Tower of Fear using the Vcc140 emulator, but had trouble getting the tape-based SAVE GAME command to work, so I switched to David Keil's DOS-based Color Computer emulator (under DOSBox, running an emulator inside an emulator!) to take advantage of its save-state support.  The only disadvantage to the switch was that the Vcc140 text mode uses a deeper black that wears better on modern eyes; the Keil emulator is more accurate, preserving the muddy, dark-green "black" of the original CoCo, which is also harder to look at.

This is a standard solve-the-puzzles-and-collect-the-treasures game -- there's no plot to speak of, no other characters beyond a monster to engage, and the titular Tower does not really inspire any degree of Fear.  But it's a pleasant diversion aside from a few annoying random events that make saving and restoring a necessity.  I have made my walkthrough available below, and at the CASA Solution Archive, but as always, I encourage interested readers to enter the Tower of Fear and explore a bit, or solve the whole game, before venturing into the...

***** SPOILERS AHEAD! *****

Right off the bat, standing at the base of the Tower, we find a memo promoting Forsythe's action game Pac-Droids, a Pac-Man clone with enough modifications to keep the publisher out of legal trouble.  The customary sign indicates that we should drop treasures here and say SCORE, per long-standing adventure tradition, and warns us that oil is scarce, which is no understatement.



The map is fairly small and tight, with few red herrings -- if something looks interesting, it probably yields a treasure under the right circumstances.  One of the first things any experienced adventurer itches to do is readily achievable -- from our starting location, we can go north and GET LAMP.  I found it necessary to maneuver in the dark a bit while solving the game to conserve lamp oil, though the adventure can be completed with the available supply.


A pit to the south of our starting point leads to the Lair of the Cyclops, who is armed with a sword instead of a club in a departure from Harryhausen cinema tradition.  There's no way to negotiate with the one-eyed brute -- he attacks as soon as he we enter his lair, and if we haven't picked up the Dagger in a nearby field, we don't have much of a chance.  Even with the dagger, success is not assured -- we must KILL CYCLOPS repeatedly, dealing and taking blows at random, hoping to take him down before he does the same to us.  It's best to tackle this battle early or SAVE GAME before entering the pit, as my success rate was about 60%.  If we succeed, THE CYCLOPS RUNS OFF DEFEATED (but not dead), leaving behind his JEWELED SCABBARD (a treasure) and a SWORD.


From the base of the Tower, we can CLIMB IVY to find an open window leading to a secret room.  It's totally dark inside, even though we just came through a window looking out on the brightly-lit outdoors, and this room is a dead end if we don't have a way to open the door here.  OPEN DOOR assumes (WITH HANDS), and NOTHING HAPPENS as a result.

The parser handles DROP ALL and GET ALL, a surprise given this game's vintage, but there's a minor bug at large - DROP without an object (or missing a space, e.g. DROPDAGGER) does a DROP ALL, which can be really annoying if we didn't notice what happened and have subsequently run out of lamp oil.  We can also YELL, yielding ARRRRRRGG! to no productive effect.


GO ARCHWAY to the north of the Tower leads to a fatal PIT OF SPIKES!  This is not really a dead end, but a puzzle; we will need to come back here later.

With the Cyclops' sword, we can CUT IVY at the base of the tower, creating a hole in the ivy that leads to an east-west corridor with a SILVER BAR treasure and a chain hanging from the ceiling.  If we PULL CHAIN, SOMETHING GOES "CLICK" AND THE CHAIN PULLS UP OUT OF REACH; this enables us to get through the door in the secret room higher up the tower.  A nearby laboratory contains a note reading "EMASES+MIRROR" -- a useful clue, though it's not immediately clear how we should use this magic word.  We have to wander around and SAY SESAME everywhere to discover its purpose.

A storage room north of the laboratory contains boxes of various colors - purple, brown, orange, black, white, green, yellow, blue, red, and pink.  I thought there might be some kind of color-based puzzle to solve here, but there's no ROYGBIV alignment or other obvious pattern.  I tried opening the boxes one at a time, hoping to find such a sequence, and was repeatedly struck by poison arrows, dying each time after a couple such hits.  At first I thought I was on the wrong track, as not one box turned out to be safe to open.  But eventually I figured out that the non-trapped box is randomized -- I was dying and restarting, so the target was constantly shifting on me.  By saving my game before opening any of the boxes, I was able to try each box in turn, dying and restoring until I discovered the right one containing the CLOCKWORK MOUSE treasure.

There's a maze of tunnels to the east of the storage room -- but we can't dawdle here, as if we spend more than a handful of turns exploring the maze, YOU ARE ATTACKED BY A VENGEFUL CYCLOPS!   Even if we have his sword in hand, we are defenseless against his new attack.  So we again have to save and restore the game, repeatedly, mapping the maze by trial and error to find our way to the Fountain Room.  This isn't too hard to do, as any wrong turn takes us back to the beginning of the maze.  In the Fountain Room, we can collect the EMERALD treasure, and DRINK FOUNTAIN to heal any non-fatal wounds we've sustained to date.

A book in the cellar has an odd cover, reading "INSERT ME INTO...", a title unlikely to rocket to the top of the bestseller lists except in, shall we say, certain niche markets.  INSERT BOOK without an obvious target yields (INTO EAR) OUCH!!!  We fill find a more appropriate resting place for it later on.

Doing the math after collecting a few treasures, SCORE seems to indicate that there are eight equally-weighted items to acquire, which proves to be correct.

Returning to the Secret Room after pulling the chain below, we can access a Library with a RUBY treasure, a ladder and a bookcase.  CLIMB LADDER seems pointless, as there's nothing to see up there, but after ignoring this apparent dead-end for a while I realized we can GET LADDER and use it elsewhere.  The ladder is also useful in a pinch due to another bug -- if the lamp runs out of oil and goes out, CLIMB LADDER provides temporary night vision; that is, we can see the contents of the room for one turn after we come back DOWN the ladder.


We can INSERT BOOK into the bookcase to reveal a secret passage to a secret laboratory containing a GOLD KEY treasure/item and a vat of acid; GO VAT is fatal, no surprise there.  A one-way passage leads us back down to the ground-floor laboratory.  DRINK ACID (yes, I had to try it) yields only YECCCCCHHHHH! and is not as fatal as going for a swim in it.

SAY SESAME turns out to be useful in front of the Archway --YOU HEAR A GRINDING SOUND, and now we can reach the courtyard of the castle, instead of dying on the spikes.  A high wall blocks further progress, unless we have the ladder.  At the top of the wall is a JEWELED STATUE treasure, and above this location is a control room with a locked lever.  A little trial-and-error comes into play here as well -- we need the gold key to UNLOCK LEVER, and then we want to PUSH LEVER to empty the vat of acid back in the secret laboratory.  The more obvious PULL LEVER causes the vat to overflow, killing us instantly upon entering the lab as we find ourselves WAIST DEEP IN ACID!   Once we enter the vastly more hospitable EMPTY VAT, we find the eighth and final treasure -- a DIAMOND.

We have collected all the treasures at the foot of the Tower of Fear, so all we have to do is say SCORE to claim riches and victory!



Tower of Fear is a fun little adventure with a pleasant sense of humor, marred only by a few random, unpredictable events and puzzles that can't be solved except by trial and error.  My walkthrough is below the fold.

**** WALKTHROUGH ****


Read more »

So it seems that Tim Schafers Double Fine is considering producing a classic-style point-and-click adventure game.  Because the genre has been commercially dead for a while, theyve opted to start by raising pledges of $400,000 via Kickstarter -- and theyre up to about $1.6 million already.  Seems a lot of people would love to see something new from one of Lucasarts adventure game greats, and Double Fine has established its own solid reputation as a purveyor of quirky, funny, and fun-to-play games.  And this new downloadable gaming era makes distribution, duplication, and marketing costs much easier to deal with.  No word yet on what the game will be, but its looking like this just may happen.

Seems there may be a bit of a point-and-click renaissance in the air.  Woo-hoo! 

Somehow, I have managed to make it through more than two years of weekly adventuring without tackling any of the classic point-and-click efforts from Lucasfilm Games.  So its high time we remedy that, with a look at Brian Moriartys LOOM, originally released in 1990 and upgraded to this CD "talkie" version in 1992.

 

LOOM doesnt get a lot of love these days, primarily because it is rather brief, and not as wildly funny as most of the publishers other titles.  Its unusual interface also takes some getting used to -- it has no inventory system, only a musical staff that the hero can use to cast magical drafts (spells), and basic point-and-click examine actions for items.  But I think LOOM is an unrecognized milestone in the development of the adventure game, for a couple of reasons.

One, LOOM is a clear bridge between the Infocom era and the point-and-click adventure; its use of spells, substantial support for applying the wrong spells, and generally wizardly narrative call the Enchanter series to mind.  Brian "Professor" Moriartys career spanned the technological gamut, from Atari BASIC (Crash Dive!) to Infocoms Z-machine (Wishbringer) and Lucasarts SCUMM engine, so the games pedigree is solid.  And LOOMs design feels like a wholehearted but carefully considered embrace of the graphical, mouse-driven age -- the minimal interface makes sense, as an attempt to tell a compelling interactive story without text or other complex forms of input.

Second, this CD-ROM edition of LOOM is a fine early example of adventure gaming finding its voice.  Raw CD Redbook audio was used originally, as on-the-fly mixing of CD and Soundblaster streams was still a bit iffy, and much of the original dialogue had to be edited down in order to squeeze the voiceover content onto the disc. Internet heresy though it may be, in my opinion the reworked dialogue is significantly improved over the original script -- it has more character and more consistency, and some generic lines are replaced with much wittier stuff.  Its also much more British in flavor, and eminently more actable, suiting the voice casting.  (Unfortunately, there are also a couple of new typos in the new onscreen text!)  Unlike the competition at Sierra On-Line, Lucasarts already had access to proper sound studios and acting talent as the new technology dawned, and this was the first CD-ROM "talkie" adventure game I played that actually sounded like a professional effort. 

The game offers Standard, Practice, and Expert difficulty levels -- Ill be playing on Standard here.  The difficulty setting affects how the games musical distaff is presented -- Expert mode doesnt label or echo the notes, so we have to learn and replay the drafts based on pitch alone.  The original release had another extra in the Expert mode, which Ill detail below, but that was omitted from the CD version along with some other details.  The current Steam release unfortunately lacks the original "radio drama" intro disc, and the Windows engine by default has an annoying graphics smoothing algorithm turned on which muddies the improved VGA graphics a bit.  The CD version also lacks the constant background music of the original, although the music excerpts that remain sound very nice.  Its good to have the onscreen text turned on, also, as some of the dialogue clips cut off too soon or are poorly aligned, leaving bits of starts and endings in the wrong place.

As always, I encourage interested adventurers to visit the world of LOOM before proceeding here.  Its not a long or difficult game, and it is still commercially available for a reasonable price on Steam.  I should warn you that the drafts are somewhat randomized, so dont take my word for any of the sequences mentioned below.  Beyond this point, young Weaver, there lie...

***** SPOILERS AHEAD! *****


(Apologies for this screenshot, I hadnt yet turned off the graphical filtering.)



As the story begins, a glowing messenger nymph arrives to wake a young, napping Weaver, our hero Bobbin Threadbare, and tell him that he is needed in the village; the voice actress does a Billie Burke/Glenda impersonation here that isnt wholly successful.  Bobbin doesnt have much to do after she departs, except climb down the mountain to the village.  If he inspects the lone leaf hanging on the tree under which he has been sleeping, it falls.  "The last leaf of autumn!", he notes.  This is portentous.

Bobbin visits the Weaver village, his home, which is now deserted; one tent can be entered, where we find the Book of Patterns (with which Bobbin is already familiar), some green fabric, and a dye-pot.  Clicking on the pot, we hear a four-note tune which presumably is a dye spell of some sort.  But at this point we have no way to cast spells, as Bobbin is under-staffed.  (Sorry.  You knew that pun was coming somewhere along the way here.)

Tapestries inside the improbably large temple hidden behind the entrance of one tent tell the story of the Great Guilds -- this bit feels very Infocom-ish, as three tapestries in sequence are encountered, and elegant prose describes the Creation of the World, the Passing of Two Shadows, the Decline of the Great Guilds and the foretold coming of a Third Shadow.

As we reach the heart of the temple, Bobbin witnesses the council of Elders punishing an older female Weaver named Hetchel, who has a lifelong connection to our hero at what now seems to be great cost to her own well-being.  She is transformed into a swans egg, unexpectedly, when the penalty draft is played, and the other Weavers in authority are transformed into swans.  This is all very strange indeed, and the voice acting here is excellent.



The temple is invaded by another swan, and they all fly off, leaving Bobbin alone in the temple.  He picks up the lead Weavers discarded distaff, and now he can play drafts, though he only has access to the first three notes, c, d and e.  The swans egg is trying to open, with e-c-e-d echoing on the musical staff when we click on it.  Playing this opening draft hatches the egg, freeing Hetchel -- now in bird form -- who tells Bobbin that strange things have been happening ever since he was born.  She calls him the "Loom Child," telling him that he must escape this island and find his destiny, before she dives into a rift in reality, following the swans to dimensions unknown.

The sequence C-f-g-c plays on the loom if we click it, but most of the notes are too high for Bobbin to play at the moment.  Exploring the village, we learn that the seagulls on the pier sing e-c-e-d also, so this is apparently a bird theme of some kind.  Or an "opening" theme, actually -- we can cast it on a clam, beachside, and one of the gulls gets a treat.  This is no doubt a useful draft for avian scavengers, and it provides a hint about how this universe works.

Now we can hear more specifically that the dye-pot draft is d-d-c-d; we can use this draft to dye things green, though Bobbin hates that grass green color.  Tipping a flask over in the dye tent plays g-f-f-e.  The manual lists all of the spells, with empty staffs for note-taking, which indirectly hints at what sorts of drafts we should be looking for, though some are red herrings.  The randomization of the drafts falls into two categories -- some spells are reversible, allowing Bobbin to do or undo something, while others are palindromes that operate in one direction only.

Some hollow trees west of the village contain three owls, yielding the partial draft c-d-d... but guessing at a fourth note isnt helpful -- Bobbin tells us either that the sequence weve tried isnt a draft, or that he doesnt think he spun that one right if we do come up with the right sequence on our own.  We have to free a rabbit from some brambles in a nearby graveyard where a fourth owl sits -- it takes the rabbit as prey and returns to its tree, allowing us to listen and complete the draft.  It is in fact c-d-d-c, at least in my playthrough, but we have to see the whole sequence revealed before we can cast the draft; guesswork doesnt count.

Another tent in the village has some gold in it.  Its dark and hard to see inside -- but, ah, we can cast the owls spell on the darkness to see with the creatures night vision assisting us.  A spinning wheel here is used to turn straw into gold -- d-e-d-c -- and discovering this also enables the "f" note on the staff.

What now?  We cant seem to do anything with the Loom in the temple, its magic is beyond Bobbins ken as a novice Weaver.  Bobbins mother, Lady Cygna Threadbare, is buried in the graveyard, and her headstone contains a poem with some clues.  Bobbin notes the last bit in particular -- "The day the sky is opened / And the Tree is split asunder."  We can focus on the sky from the graveyard, but trying to open it yields only, "Maybe I should stand a bit closer."  Returning to the mountaintop, and opening the sky, we see lightning strike the tree and send it tumbling into the lake below; it floats and comes to rest by the dock.  Is this transportation?  Yes, Bobbin can set out on the floating tree for parts unknown, with some of the swans trailing behind him.



Along the way, he encounters an ocean-borne tornado, a waterspout.  The open draft doesnt do anything, but clicking on the waterspout yields c-f-c-c.  Reversing this twisting draft to c-c-f-c untwists it., and reaching shore earns Bobbin access to the "g" on the staff.

From the beach we can enter a forest or approach the glowing green city of Crystalgard.  In the city, we observe an official of some kind conversing with an older man.  Approaching, Bobbin can eavesdrop -- these are the Bishop, and Master Crucible.  Apparently a sphere with the ability to see 4-6 hours into the future has been produced, but the Bishop demands an 8-hour capacity.  After these characters depart, Bobbin can enter a tall crystal; ringing the bell inside transports us to a tower where two men are sharpening a scythe of some sort.  Its a restricted area, so we are summarily sent back (though not killed, as this is a Lucasarts game!)

We can enter another part of the crystal structure, where one Master Goodmold welcomes us and asks if its true that peering beneath a Weavers hood brings instant, agonizing death.  Bobbin doesnt know, but this is a useful hint.  Goodmold allows us to look around, "but if you break it, you buy it!"  A finely sculpted chalice is worth investigating -- we can reverse the spill spell we learned from the flask back home to fill it with wine, though we dont need to do so.  We can also explore this area, using one of those then-fascinating "force the player to navigate the 3-D space!  Isnt this cool?" paths through the backgrounds several doors and transport towers.

In the forest outside the city, Bobbin meets a group of four shepherds who are sure he is here to steal their sheep.  They have heard of a wizard foretold and ask Bobbin to show off some magic; they also have some invisibility magic of their own.  None of our drafts seem to work, but when they become invisible, we hear g-c-g-c.  Lets try that... no good, they are not impressed.  This scene has much-improved dialogue compared to the originals generic dismissals -- the shepherds are heartily-voiced and jauntily insulting, sending poor Bobbin away with, "Dont trip on your robe, little Wizard!"

Maybe we can use the invisibility spell in the crystal city now.  We can see something going on up in the tower, probably the people working on the scythe.  We seem to have no opportunity to go invisible ourselves, though; at least theres no obvious way to target Bobbin.  The crystal room is a cemetery, where we can note husband and wife, Luscent and Softshard Bottleblow, buried side by side.

If we empty the chalice and examine it, Bobbin remarks on its beauty and we get a brief history lesson from Master Goodmold.  This artifact is the famous Chromax Conundrum -- for unknown reasons, carved out of diamond instead of glass by Luscent Bottleblow -- and it is the only surviving example of his work after a dragon attacked the city years ago.  We learn that the first Scrying Sphere was lost in the attack -- so perhaps we should see if we can find it.

While we have been exploring, a solution comes to mind -- we can cast the invisibility spell on the people working in the tower, which effectively makes Bobbin invisible, it just works differently than I had assumed.  He can eavesdrop on the workers to learn that Master Crucible is selling a scrying sphere to the Bishop for a considerable sum, though nobody knows why the Clerics would want such a thing.

Invisible Bobbin can also walk right past the workers and take a different crystal tower to access the Scrying Sphere.  And now, in one of those illogical time-travel puzzles, we learn that e-f-f-e apparently transforms Bobbin (in what appears to be an illusory fashion) into some beast that scares the Shepherds away.  So now we have a new draft -- I guess the learning is legit, its just a paradox that doesnt quite make sense.  We can also see a vision of fire in a cave, and of a swans eye, hearing C-f-g-c as the associated draft.  Examining the deadly giant scythe on the way back out of the tower, we learn a-a-a-g -- apparently a sharpening draft.

Using the illusory spell, the shepherds now see Bobbin as the dragon of times past and flee.  A new draft, d-e-f-a, sends the remaining shepherds sheep over the fence, and the inverse brings them back again.  We can dye the sheep green, and the shepherd complains about it -- how can he watch sheep he can hardly see? -- but there doesnt seem to be a reason to do this.

At the far end of the shepherds fields, we find a small cottage.  Here, Fleece, female leader of the Shepherds, tells Bobbin that there are problems with the dragon.  The creature spots the white sheep easily and makes off with them, which is making it very hard to fill Bishop Mandibles order for 10,000 sheep.  Hmmmm.  Is he raising an army?  Of sheep?

Theres a sickly lamb in the cottage, and we can try to dye it green to demonstrate the idea that obviously springs to mind, but no, that doesnt work.  Fleeces healing spell -- c-a-a-c -- is not helping the poor animal, but we should make note of the spell for later.  We can turn all the sheep in the field green -- and immediately, the Dragon arrives and picks up Bobbin as the easiest target.  She is disappointed in her catch, comically so, and rather vain and house-proud to boot; this dialogue is substantially rewritten for CD, and the performance is very entertaining. 



The dragon informs us that some wizard came in a while back and made off with much of her treasure, and destroyed her glass collection, except for a glass ball that survived.  Can we reverse d-e-d-c to turn her gold into straw?  Yes.  She demands we turn it back -- NOW -- but we gain the "a" note on the distaff for our trouble.  We also learn that shes not fond of breathing fire -- she can do it, but generally wont.

So we have learned a bit, and we arent being eaten, but we are still stuck in the Dragons cave.  The healing spell doesnt help us, but we can use the e-f-f-e spell to manifest as fire -- apparently we look like whatever our target fears or at least dislikes the most.  The dragon flees, and afterwards... hmmm.  The straw is actually all burned, so Bobbins fire mode was more than an illusion, it seems.  Now we can navigate out of the dragons cave through an unblocked passage -- the fire fulfilled the earlier vision from the scrying sphere -- and cast the owl spell so we can maneuver through the dark cavern, with a simple "spotlight" showing only the immediate area around Bobbin.  We can wander around quite a bit, but the only "success" I had here was finally walking Bobbin off a ledge, causing him to take a one-way fall to another part of the cavern.

Theres a pool here; what draft should we use on it?  Clicking on it yields a new draft -- f-a-a-f -- which shows Bobbins reflection in the water.  Trying the spill spell indicates that we must be trying to flood the cave; the inverse, however, dries it up, and we find the dragons Scrying Sphere.  It shows us an erupting volcano, reprises the earlier vision of Mother Cygna, and shows us Bishop Mandible acting generally suspicious.

Now how do we get out of here?  I tried a number of spells on the pool in both dry and filled states, to no avail, before figuring out that we have to travel back into the maze proper by going up behind the area where we emerged after falling.  Now we can make our way out of the cavern to a twisty outdoor staircase, untwisting it to continue. 

We find ourselves in a cemetery, lit with an eery orange glow.  A boy lies fast asleep on the ground; we can cast the healing spell to wake him, long enough to learn that he is one Rusty Nailbender of the blacksmiths guild, before he falls asleep again.  There really is some beautiful artwork in this game, considering the era and the newness of 256-color VGA graphics:



Bobbin can approach the impressive smithy; he is told by a strapping, shirtless man in the tower that the gate only opens for Blacksmiths, but the open spell gets Bobbin in, at least until he is immediately escorted back out.

Casting the fear spell on Rusty doesnt do anything; we can try the "send home" sheep tune, but Rusty just complains about being bothered and goes back to sleep.  We can try to cast the open draft on one of the graves -- the ground shakes, and Bobbin concludes that perhaps he should not try that.

What have we learned recently?  The reflect spell doesnt do anything interesting on the grave, despite its shiny bronze surface. But we can cast it on the boy, and it switches our images.  Now Bobbin looks like Rusty and can enter the smithy.  Unfortunately, just like the real Rusty, Bobbin has gathered no firewood, so he is thrown into a dungeon while the distaff is taken from him as a scrawny bit of fuel.  The blacksmiths are busy making swords for the Clerics, which seems a very unclerical thing for them to be needing.

Stuck in the cell without the distaff, Bobbin-as-Rusty is tempted to sleep on the straw.  Its the only thing we can do, actually, and sets off a fairly complicated cutscene.  The dragon spots the sleeping "Bobbin" and devours his flesh (offscreen), leaving a bloody skeleton behind and an angry Ghost of Rusty.  The distaff cast into the fire magically refuses to burn, drawing the attention of Hetchel (still in bird form), who arrives avis ex machina to return it to Bobbin, who has returned to his normal appearance now that the mirror image is disrupted.

Exiting the cell with the open draft, Bobbin can explore the smithy a bit, or would do so if he didnt realize hes inappropriately dressed.  We can go downstairs to eavesdrop on Bishop Mandible some more; like most power-mad world-domination schemers, hes not being very circumspect about his plans.  The ten thousandth sword is almost finished!  Wed better cast an unsharpen draft -- g-a-a-a -- but its too noisy to cast any drafts in the active forge.  Listening to the Bishops conversation produces a brief respite from the blacksmiths pounding during which we can do a little weaving.  The draft a-a-a-g doesnt do anything, so lets try sharpening it instead.  This doesnt quite work as I expected -- it acts the same way a twist spell would have, ruining the blade and getting the quietly lurking Bobbin noticed by Bishop Mandible, and not in a good way.

Bobbin is thrown into a hanging cage, where Mandibles assistant Cob (seen later in a Secret of Monkey Island cameo, where his name is spelled "Cobb" and he promotes LOOM) is eager to torture the young Weaver.  Bobbin and Looms provinciality are somewhat underestimated by the arrogant Bishop, and theres some good dialogue and acting in this scene.  Bobbin is forced to demonstrate his power by opening the cage -- it comes to mind that perhaps it would be more interesting to open the cage of a small dragon also housed here, but its not accessible at the moment.



Mandible takes Bobbins staff, and informs us that he plans to open the vast graveyard below, raising an army of ten thousand undead soldiers and launching the Age of the Clerics.  He has preparations to attend to and dismisses Bobbin, under Cobs watchful eye, as he is to touch nothing.  We can try to gaze into the Bishops Scrying Sphere -- not touching it, mind -- but Cob wont stand for it and demands a foolish trade.  He wants to do some looking of his own, testing the old warning that to look under a Weavers hood brings death, and it does, as it turns out.  Its a quick, disintegratey death, though Cobs screams are heard only as annoying noise by the Bishop out on the balcony.  (The original version showed us Bobbins bare face, briefly, when playing on Expert difficulty, but that feature was cut for this edition; I admit to being curious, but storywise I like the idea of the Weavers staying hooded and mysterious.)

Now Bobbin can observe the sphere, where he sees an image of mother Cygna again, a roast bird of some sort, and a single black feather floating to the ground.  We return to the balcony, but do not have time to stop the Bishop -- he opens the very fabric of the world, releasing an evil being who resembles Disneys Maleficent.



The new CD script makes it clear that Chaos does not consider herself to have been summoned; she has been released, and thirsts for power.  She tears the Bishops body apart in a surprisingly graphic bit of animation, and then stalks off in search of evil to do on this plane.  The distaff is left behind for Bobbin to reclaim, but the other cage in the dungeon is now open.  The hungry dragon steals up behind Bobbin on the balcony, causing him to fall into the rift in reality.

Through various wormholes, Bobbin can revisit earlier locations to marshall his resources for the presumably apocalyptic battle ahead.  Visiting the blacksmiths graveyard, we encounter the late Rusty, who is a bit ticked off at being dragged back to the real world while waiting to finish his transition to the next.  He is saddened that the Forge has been destroyed, of course, but we can heal his corpse to restore Rusty to the land of the living, which improves his disposition.  He goes off to investigate the fate of his fellow smiths.  Wed like to follow, but Bobbin cant wander far while visiting these earlier locations, just to keep the narrative tight.

Revisiting Crystalgard, we find Master Goodmold dying on the ground.  The crystalmakers could not bring themselves to use the Scythe, fearing its terrible power would make them the equal of the enemy; Chaos stole it and is now armed for the worlds destruction.  His corpse vanishes before we can heal him.



We can also reach a new location, the Shore of Wonder, outside the Pattern of the world, where Mother Cygna and the other swans are floating.  Bobbin is the first to see it with mortal eyes, but he doesnt have the full range of notes on the distaff yet.  Bobbin learns that the swan is in fact his mother (this has been thoroughly telegraphed earlier), who did not die but was banished in swan form by the Elders when Bobbin was born of the loom, unforeseen.  We also learn that Chaos seeks control of the Loom, while Hetchel is trying to stop her.  Cygna advises her son to close the holes rent in the Pattern before confronting Chaos.

We stop by the Shepherds field again, to find most of them dead, and Fleece trying to put them out of their misery.  She enlists Bobbins help, but while we cant invert it, the healing spell actually works, and they are revived.  The new CD script has Fleece and company fearing Chaos impending "harvest," which is a much better and more Irish-accent-friendly line than the original, in which they feared that, erm, "the Dead Ones [will] return to reap us again!"

With the last hole sealed, note "b" is added to the staff, and Bobbin can cross the Shore of Wonder to return to the island of Loom, and to the Temple where the Loom itself resides. 

Which draft should we use on the Loom?  The open and heal spells do nothing, nor does untwist.  Clicking on the Loom yields Cygnas draft, but we still dont have access to the high C needed to weave it.  Chaos appears and demands that we teach her to use the Loom, as her trusted advisor, despite Bobbins protestations and outright refusals.  Chaos has drafts of her own, and Hetchel is silenced when she tries to give Bobbin the unmaking draft necessary to rend the Loom and defeat Chaos.  (Chaos was male in the original game, but her voice and gender are clearly female this time around.)

Maybe we can unsharpen Chaos scythe now?  All of our magic appears useless on her.  We cant heal or reflect Hetchel to free up her speech.  Clicking on the loom yields b-a-g-f; reversing it does nothing interesting.  Casting it on Hetchel frees up her speech, but she soon gets fried by Chaos, and served on a plate, to boot. 

Now the Loom gives us b-f-b-f... but what to cast it on?  Hetchel, the Loom, and the Dead One seem impervious to it.  But we can reverse it on Hetchel; the Loom is just echoing the most recent spell cast, which I had forgotten.  She returns to bird form, but now gets killed properly by Chaos, rather graphically torn apart in a small but bloody explosion; Chaos also seizes Hetchels last feather (as seen earlier in the Scrying Sphere) as a memento.

The Loom now recalls b-c-c-b.  We can use it to rend the loom in similar fashion.  Now Chaos is unhappy, trapped on one side of reality, but so are the rest of Bobbins friends, subject to her now-limited but still thoroughly evil reign.  High "C" is added to the staff, and Bobbin knows he must return and face Chaos.

However, we are now floating outside the Pattern, with the last note available.  Our earlier visions and recent events indicate that C-f-g-c ought to be useful now.  Bobbin casts it on himself... and...



Bobbin turns into a swan and flies off with the others, leaving Chaos in charge of the remaining world on the other side of the rift.  Presumably our hero may be back to fight another day, but its not a very satisfying ending, given that no sequel emerged.  (Apparently two were planned, FORGE and FOLD, featuring further adventures of Rusty and Fleece and presumably a final confrontation with Chaos, but these games didnt happen.)

The original LOOM had closing scenes of Rusty and Fleece watching the swans fly away, but these were cut from the CD version.  One suspects this is because it was now clear that the sequels were not going to see production, but these moments might also have been trimmed so that the CD music could play through the ending credits, without pausing to load new data from the disc -- quite a slow proposition at the time.

Hey, George "The Fatman" Sanger of The 7th Guest fame worked on the music!



I played LOOM when it was released back in 1992, and enjoyed revisiting it for this post.  It may not be a masterpiece of adventure gaming -- it is on the easy side, as at worst we just have to try casting every draft we can think of on every object we encounter -- but its a solid piece of interactive storytelling, with solid graphics and great voice acting, and I have always enjoyed it on that level.  It also captures a moment in time, as the text adventure gave way to the full-blown multimedia era, and many of Lucasarts innovations inform gaming to this day.