izigame.me

If Curie is your least favorite Fallout 4 companion, you will hate this game.

Maybe it was because I just came off playing the Riven remake, but this game was a major flop for me. The narrator is annoying, the puzzles are unenjoyable and clunky, and the story is nonexistent. I wasn't sure it was possible for Cyan to swing and miss on this scale--they talked this game up for years prior to release, and I was so excited to bag it on sale.

For me, my disappointment with this game really came down to three things, all of which Cyan has historically been stellar in their handling: story, world, and puzzle design.

Beginning with puzzle design--the puzzles simply aren't well-designed, in my opinion. They're clunky, awkward, and rely exclusively on manipulating machines. There's no cool "learn this new writing/numbering system and associate clues with numbers in order to find out a code" here, largely because outside of the sockets for your Adjunct, there's literally nothing TO interact with in this world. There's no "write this down, it'll be handy later." You're thrown into areas with puzzles that move and do things, but you have no idea what the end goal is. You know it's a puzzle to solve, but you're unsure what that solution looks like so you spend the first half hour fumbling in the dark, trying to find the goal so you can work towards it. This theme of being thrown into the dark is carried by every single puzzle in the game. These puzzles seemingly are designed with the delusion that their solution should intuitively come to the player.

Moving on to the world design, don't get me wrong, it's beautiful. Each of the three realms has its own theme, and are filled with towering structures and mountains. You're excited each time you step into a new world, but that excitement wears off pretty quickly. The more you walk around, the more you realize that although these worldspaces are huge in vertical scale, their actual playable area is...really small. I feel like Riven, made in 1997, had a larger worldspace than this game did overall, and even for an indie studio, I feel like that's a bit of a low blow on Cyan's part. Tied into the puzzle design, this game also doesn't reward you when you solve puzzles--you'll gain access to a tiny new area where you'll immediately be hit with a new puzzle that's even more frustrating than the one you just finished. The sound design also falls incredibly short here. There's a bit of atmospheric synth music, but the tiny things in previous games that made this world feel real simple isn't there. No footstep sounds, minimal sounds when interacting with anything, and overall a feeling of sterility. No one *lives* in these worlds, and that's a bummer coming from a company that used to have "turn off the lights, turn up the speakers, and let Myst become your world" as a slogan.

And finally, the biggest disappointment coming from a studio like Cyan--the story is simply not there. Maybe I'm spoiled to Cyan's OG titles that I grew up playing, like Myst and Riven, but one thing I have always loved about Cyan's games is that story is woven into every detail of their games. Journals, books, items in drawers, all filled with not only relevant info for solving puzzles later on, but story context, character details, pre-history, and little things that make the worlds feel completely alive and immersive. Firmament shares none of this, and the story is only told in vague narrations by your mentor (whose name you never even learn?) in a way that never really explains anything. You're only given any context for WHY you're even there at the end of the game, with no real resolution. You started the game alone, and you end the game alone, but with an annoying French NPC trying to make you feel guilty for something you have no memory of. The premise of this game is AMAZING, don't get me wrong. But given that the premise is never explained until the long monologue just before the end of the game, you don't get to enjoy the setting at all. You are a Keeper. You don't know what that is, other than a janitor for these three small realms that are static and don't do anything unless you're making machines do things, yet somehow that job is of paramount importance. You hear big, capitalized worlds like Threshold and The Embrace, but never really find out what they are. The ending "twist" is predictable from the beginning. I found the mentor to be more annoying than anything else, but maybe it's just because I find French accents annoying.

In addition to all of this, there's annoying bugs that threaten to break the game. I got stuck on a stairwell for ten minutes because I had the audacity to run, and got caught on the banister. Collision meshes in this game are a dumpster fire, and made several of the puzzles much harder than they needed to be. The cherry on top is that this game costs $35. For a game like Riven, or especially Obduction, that would be worth it. But if you pay more than $20 for this game, you are going to want at least part of your money back.

I suppose, for me, this game falls apart because I grew up playing Cyan's other games, and more recently, Obduction and the Riven remake. I know what this company is capable of. By itself, if you've never played any of the Myst games, or really any of Cyan's other games, Firmament is a fine game that is thin, but stands on its feet okay when you have no expectation of it. But when you compare it to what it *could* be, it feels empty, hollow, and cold. Sorely disappointing coming from such a wonderful studio.