ASK ME ABOUT LOOM
Often people who have no idea what point and click adventure games are will very confidently tell you that the genre died because it was too reliant on "moon logic" and nobody had any patience for it. Disregarding that these people probably consider filing their tax returns to also be "moon logic", it shows just how little people understand about what made the genre such a widely popular staple of PC gaming for so long.
Monkey Island, Myst, Kings Quest, 7th Guest, all of these games were so much more than a simple string of progress blockers that everyone just had to deal with, they were truly adventures that the game took you on with the puzzles and object trading only being a fragment of the whole. The idea of games being merely sets of challenges to overcome has led people to think of point and click adventure games as some sort of "solved" riddle, the only reason to play being to win and the singular solutions being laid out in walkthroughs an indication of their humiliating defeat. After all, the game is beaten and will always be beaten in the same way, the road is completely paved.
It's games like Loom that really bring out the heart and soul of a point and click, taking away some of the usual tools of its peers and replacing them with a simple Casio keyboard and inviting you to push the buttons and see what happens. There's nothing complicated about playing Loom, and yet its simple loop of "repeat after me" discovery and experimentation is one that is immediately immersive and finds you soon embroiled in its simple world of cities where everybody has one job.
Loom is incredibly charming and is perhaps the chief example of why we once called this genre "adventure" games. Others have walked the same road, but the walking is not the road.
Often people who have no idea what point and click adventure games are will very confidently tell you that the genre died because it was too reliant on "moon logic" and nobody had any patience for it. Disregarding that these people probably consider filing their tax returns to also be "moon logic", it shows just how little people understand about what made the genre such a widely popular staple of PC gaming for so long.
Monkey Island, Myst, Kings Quest, 7th Guest, all of these games were so much more than a simple string of progress blockers that everyone just had to deal with, they were truly adventures that the game took you on with the puzzles and object trading only being a fragment of the whole. The idea of games being merely sets of challenges to overcome has led people to think of point and click adventure games as some sort of "solved" riddle, the only reason to play being to win and the singular solutions being laid out in walkthroughs an indication of their humiliating defeat. After all, the game is beaten and will always be beaten in the same way, the road is completely paved.
It's games like Loom that really bring out the heart and soul of a point and click, taking away some of the usual tools of its peers and replacing them with a simple Casio keyboard and inviting you to push the buttons and see what happens. There's nothing complicated about playing Loom, and yet its simple loop of "repeat after me" discovery and experimentation is one that is immediately immersive and finds you soon embroiled in its simple world of cities where everybody has one job.
Loom is incredibly charming and is perhaps the chief example of why we once called this genre "adventure" games. Others have walked the same road, but the walking is not the road.