For this week, I tried out this free game on Steam called WooLoop! It’s a game where you get to do string art to create drawings and shapes by looping colored strings on the pins in certain patterns.
It’s a chill game and my viewers shared with me that it’s relaxing to watch when I streamed it. I’ve never done string art in real life so it’s fascinating to see how the strings are shaped to create the outlines!
Download on: Steam (Free)
How to play
The instructions are pretty simple, you pick an image stage to create, use your mouse to spin a ‘loop’ and connect the strings between one circle point to another to form a shape. The game will tell you which order and point to go to next, and which way to turn the loop. If you make a mistake, the game will tell you and you can simply undo them.
There are sometimes minor glitches on the strings when I tried to connect them especially when the pins are far apart or very close to each other, but nothing major and still solvable. At first I thought it’s something about my keyboard or panning setting, but when I try the other stages I got the hang of it better.
Sounds
There is no sound effect in the game, which at times makes the game feel a bit too quiet, as I expected some sounds to play when we completed a level, or when a successful loop is made or when mistakes happen.
There is background piano music which is greatly calming and easy to listen to, and at some points it feels satisfying when you get to loop the strings to the rhythm of the music.
Stages to Play
Currently there are 5 free galleries, 1 bonus gallery you can access after visiting the dev’s social media, and one DLC gallery. For me, each of stage can vary from 10-15 minutes on the first gallery, but I can see the last two stages for the first gallery will take longer since they are larger with more pins.
When I started playing, I set off the title of each stage to be hidden to ‘???’, so it will be a surprise for me to guess what picture it’s going to be for that stage, and I made a guessing game with my chat.
I also set the timer and progress percent on, so I can keep track of my progress and arrange my time on my stream if I should do another stage or not, since these options are all turned off by default when I first play I do recommend checking out the settings first when you launch the game and adjust it to your liking.
Personally I enjoy the drawings with bigger loops and repeating, crossing string patterns, which feels satisfying and relaxing to follow at a certain rhythm. My favorites are the Hot Air balloon one, Whale, and Anchor stage.
I personally don’t really enjoy the ones with too repetitive patterns and long loops for one string such as the ‘Diamond’, or the short repeating square ones like ‘Pixel 10’ since I felt the small square loops were quite straining for my arm compared to the other stages.
There’s one time I lost my progress on the Diamond one when I pressed Home to show the other stages when I had a raid on my stream, I thought it would save my progress midway but it seems it doesn’t record it until I finish one string to the end. It frustrated me a little, but I managed to repeat it and catch up since I wanted the completionist sense of finishing all in one gallery.
Note that there are no custom levels or free mode here, so after you’re finished all the levels, what you can do is to replay existing levels to unlock some stuff like more string colors, or try to beat your previous time. I think it’ll be fun to have a free mode to make your own creations, though I have doubts I can create some nice masterpiece, hahah.
Well, that was my impression of my first gameplay of WooLoop! Overall I think it’s a cute, relaxing game you can play casually. Honestly it sparked my curiosity to try out string art in real life, though I know it won’t be as easy to neatly do it like in the game :’)
The game is easy to understand and you don’t have to do any guesswork, since you just have to follow the guided instructions. I enjoy trying to guess the image from the pins position and colors, then revealing the image as we go through connecting the strings.
Hope this game can be enjoyable for you to try out as well! Stay tuned for updates of other games I’ll be trying out this year!
I’ll mostly be streaming on Twitch on weekly basis at night 9PM and above on GMT+7 timezone. I’m interested in other chill games like this as well, feel free to drop in your suggestions!
