Review: Tales From The Loop: They Grow Up So Fast
Tales From The Loop makes it across the North Sea with its sense of melancholic ennui intact. John Power heads to the Norfolk Broads in search of adventure and Space Raiders.
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For over fifty years now roleplaying games have allowed us to visit places of terrifying wonder, from fantasy realms where dragons blot out the sun to alien planets dotted with singing crystal monoliths. With They Grow Up So Fast though Oz Mills invites us to explore one of tabletop game’s lesser visited locales, the sleepy English seaside town of Great Yarmouth.
A new campaign book for Free League’s Tales From The Loop RPG, They Grow Up So Fast may move the game’s action from the suburbs of Sweden to the Norfolk Broads but otherwise maintains the game’s melancholic Goonies vibe. For those out of the, well loop I guess, Tales From The Loop is one of the more charming, relatively rules-lite, games to have appeared in recent years. Based upon the art books by Simon Stalenhag, it’s set in an alternative 1980s, one where technological breakthroughs have led to marvels such as anti-grav cargo ships and autonomous robots but not a cure of childhood ennui.
The Loops themselves are giant particle accelerators used for all manner of no good, clandestine activities by cartoonishly sinister three letter agencies, and inevitably the cause of high weirdness to enter the otherwise quotidian lives of our young protagonists. In the case of They Grow Up So Fast that involves an accidental dimensional breach, a rip in the fabric of the universe through which some kind of pregnant space hippo entered our reality, no really. Said space hippo then took one look around, dropped off its freshly hatched spawn and quickly buggered off back to its home dimension without hanging around to collect its mum of the year award.
Anyway, if space hippo mum isn’t willing to step up, then the job must fall to a motley collection of pre-pubescent Norfolk kids. Yes, it’s E.T. via Grange Hill and it is of course really rather wonderful. The campaign consists of four adventures that follow the course of the year as the children discover our baby space hippo whilst on a camping trip and then must protect it from the machinations of the aforementioned moustache twirling adults.
As is the way with these things baby space hippo is also on an accelerated growth programme, cue an ever escalating series of problems for a bunch of kids who in normal circumstances would probably struggle to keep a hamster alive, let alone something the size of a transit van and is, you know, not from our dimension.
I’ll be honest here. I grew up in the 1980s, in suburbia, and spent most my free time ranging a disconcertingly wide area on my BMX desperately hoping to escape boredom and get into the kind of trouble that just falls into Tales From the Loop’s character’s laps. So I’m always a little wary that my enthusiasm for and critical evaluation of the game isn’t entirely clear headed.
Throw in the fact that relocating things to the UK allows me to spend even more time day dreaming about the cultural detritus of my rapidly receding youth, like for example Space Raiders crisps, and objectivity is much like our space hippo mum long gone. Luckily, as the editor of this magazine, I can occasionally indulge myself and They Grow Up So Fast is an all you can eat nostalgia buffet that I will happily gorged myself upon again and again.
Anyway let's just wrap this up by saying that They Grow Up So Fast hits all the right notes for a Loop campaign. It situates the magical in the mundane, it’s a bit sad, there are even small town bullies to overcome! Look, much as I love a good game of MÖRK BORG you don’t get catharsis like this on the miserable streets Galgenebeck. More UK Loop please!
Writer: Oz Mills
Art: Jaroslaw Kubicki, Martyna Starczewska, Simon Stålenhag
Published by Free League
This feature originally appeared in Wyrd Science Vol.1, Issue 6 (August '24)
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