Firmament feels like it was thrown into a time capsule at some point around 1993, with beautiful vistas, a haunting storyline, and a difficulty curve like the side of a skyscraper. If you’re in the market for a truly difficult puzzle-adventure game, albeit one with occasionally baffling controls, that’s what Firmament offers you.
It’s about what you’d expect from the team that made Myst. Firmament is the latest game from Mead, Wash.-based Cyan Worlds, and it’s exactly the sort of game Cyan likes to make. It’s an immersive first-person adventure set in a surreal alternate world, with no violence or danger, but featuring some of the toughest puzzles in the business.
In Firmament, you play as the newest and only living member of the multiverse’s maintenance team. The Keepers used to work behind the scenes to fix and repair the strange machines that kept several worlds running, but something went horribly wrong and only one Keeper was left. Now she’s dead, you’re her replacement, and you’ve got a lot to do.
If I had to sum Firmament’s mood up in one word, it’d be “melancholy.” It’s a game about abandonment, set in and among strange technologies that have run by themselves for too long. Firmament is full of spectacular vistas and surreal imagery, but it’s all overgrown or too quiet or just a little broken, like an art museum after the end of the world. If nothing else, Firmament is a beautiful game to simply look at.
It’s still a game from Cyan, however, and some of Cyan’s trademark sadism has snuck into this project. Firmament was made via a successful Kickstarter campaign, and like a lot of crowdfunded games, it’s laser focused on a specific, narrow niche. Firmament, like Myst, Riven, and Obduction before it, is for people who like tough, borderline unfair adventure games. If your idea of a productive weekend’s entertainment is spending six hours beating your head against two or three puzzles, then Firmament was made for you.
In fact, it went too far in that direction. There are a lot of puzzles in Firmament that aren’t difficult so much as obtuse, or maybe just old fashioned. While I played it, I found myself thinking of games from the early CD-ROM era, around the heyday of the original Myst, when developers were still figuring out what the new technology was good for.
It’s not that Firmament has bad controls, but that it occasionally has really backwards controls. There are parts of this game that feel like they’re 30 years old, because they’re making the sorts of mistakes you’d have seen in a bad Sega CD game from 1994.
A good example comes from one of the first puzzles in the game, where you’re asked to use a crane to move a cargo crate into a particular position to use it as a makeshift bridge. It’s a classic.
However, the control panel for that crane is a couple of hundred in-game yards away from the gap you’re trying to bridge and faces in the opposite direction. You can’t actually see what you’re doing, aside from making an educated guess from the control panel’s heads-up display. If you get it wrong, you have to turn around and run towards the gap to check. It’s like trying to parallel-park by remote control.
This isn’t the only time it happens. A few different puzzles in Firmament have similar issues, where you have to solve them blind or use some backwards interface just for that section of the game. It’s an exercise in frustration. I was particularly annoyed by a sequence at roughly the game’s halfway point where I had to pilot a drone with a control interface that made it feel like a really big, really broken shopping cart.
I suspect the idea here was that Cyan wanted to preserve the sense of immersion above all else. The idea is that you never leave your character’s perspective under any circumstances, in order to preserve the illusion that you’re actually inhabiting this world. It’s a big part of what makes VR games as absorbing as they are. Immersion and frustration aren’t the same thing, though.
Cyan’s really turned up its art and narrative design with Firmament; even when I was annoyed by a particular puzzle, I put up with it because I wanted to find out more about what had happened to the Keepers, in this strange world between worlds that Cyan’s created.
As it is, Firmament is a throwback to the ‘90s, for better and for worse. It’s unapologetic about its difficulty and does some really clever things with the medium, but at a couple of particular points, it feels like a game that was made by somebody who hasn’t played any other video games since Deep Space Nine went off the air.
Firmament is available now for Windows, MacOS, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation VR.
[Cyan Worlds provided a Steam code for Firmament for the purpose of this review.]
