This steampunk adventure shows that Myst’s devs haven’t lost their touch - Firmament Quick Review

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PLAY IT OR SKIP IT?

Play it if you’re up for a slow-paced stroll and some challenging puzzles. Firmament is an all-new game from Cyan Worlds, the developer of the legendary Myst and Riven games, and while Firmament is a fully 3D world, its continuity with those earlier adventures is impossible to miss. Firmament’s puzzles all involve manipulating complex, beautiful machinery rather than shuffling through inventory items. I enjoyed piecing together its story of interdimensional caretakers of reality from the few clues they left behind almost as much as I loved the feeling of finally figuring out how to get one of their huge machines working the way I wanted.

TIME PLAYED

I’ve played three hours of Firmament so far, which has been enough time to reach the hub area and activate one of three key spires in one of the game’s three “instances.” The spire I switched on added new power to the gauntlet that I used to interact with Firmament’s puzzles. That handy tool is called the Adjunct, and it served as my interface for lift buttons, doorways, and the many switches that control mechanical contraptions I found along the way. So far, I’ve reorganized a train car system that runs on the walls of a building, navigated my way through a hanging garden inside gargantuan greenhouse tower, and restored the power to a seaside electrical station.

WHAT’S AWESOME

• The world. Firmament takes place in a mountaintop research facility that’s split into three “realms,” all of which appear to be versions of the same place at different points in time, or perhaps in different versions of reality. The facility’s aesthetics draw heavily from steampunk, but there’s a surprisingly grounded feel to the place. Even the teleportation pods that transported me back to the hub area felt appropriately weighty and authentic, and I loved the way the spherical monorail car shifted to stay upright as I gazed through its curved glass windows at the rocky spires and ocean below.

• Puzzle design. I’m pleased to say that the folks at Cyan Worlds still have that magic touch they first brought forward in Myst all those years ago. If anything, the puzzle designs I’ve seen so far in Firmament have been improvements on the original formula. While they can sometimes be cumbersome to navigate, they all adhere to strict rules and so far haven’t required me to unearth some obscure MacGuffin from across the map or combine two seemingly unrelated items in my inventory. They’re fascinating to look at too: massive steampunk machinery that sometimes stretches out toward the horizon or high into the sky, and which all at least appear to be physically possible.

• A grand sense of place. One of the things people find most striking when they try VR for the first time is how far up everything seems to go all of a sudden, unbounded by the usual limits of a 16:9 screen. Firmament can be played in VR, but somehow it managed to capture that sense of scale and sheer height even when running on my desktop monitor. The mountain peaks and valleys that stretched out before me when I gazed over a balcony or outlook were often breathtaking to behold.

• Lots of ways to play. As I mentioned above, Firmament works either on desktop or in VR, and it’s now Steam Deck verified as well, so you have plenty of options for how you want to experience this adventure.

WHAT SUCKS

• Fidgety controls. The one frustration that popped up for me more than anything else during my time with Firmament was the delicate aim I needed to connect my Adjunct to the coupling I wanted to use. By holding the left mouse button, I readied the Adjunct, and any nearby couplings glowed with an icon, with the one I was currently aimed at lit with green. I’d let go of my mouse button, but the slightest nudge would send my Adjunct’s probe out toward a different coupling than the one I had been trying to use. This wouldn’t be much of a problem if it only happened occasionally, but unfortunately it’s frequent enough to be pretty annoying.

• Bugs. Overall, Firmament was a stable experience for me, but I ran into issues in a couple of scenes with textures loading in very late. When I entered the big greenhouse area, for example, it appeared to be a completely empty chasm for several seconds until the level geometry, puzzle components, and their associated textures finally appeared on screen. Again, this isn’t a big deal, especially as it’s been very rare during my playthrough.

• Puzzles can be cumbersome to navigate. While I’ve enjoyed the design of each of the puzzles I’ve encountered in Firmament, the practicalities of navigating around and through them in order to try new solutions can make them take longer than it feels as though it should, which is frustrating. When I knew what I wanted to do, but had to wait through several elevator animations in order to get to the place where I could make it happen, I started to lose my appreciation for the beautifully crafted environments.

💬 Are you an old-school Myst fan who is eager to try a new puzzle adventure, or will you be content to skip this interdimensional voyage? Let me know in the comments.