![]() ![]() ![]() This is yet another mind-bending game that will test your puzzle-solving skills and patience as you explore the three realms of Firmament. The game will also launch on PlayStation 4/5 and PlayStation VR 2 at a later date, and I played on the Steam standard version, so I can’t comment on the VR experience. It's a nice stroll, but no one's going to be making a sequel to Pyst off the back of it.Firmament is a first-person steampunk puzzle game from Myst/Riven creators, Cyan Worlds, and released on May 19, 2023, on Steam and GOG in standard and VR modes. But outside of the imagery and scope of its megalithic sci-fi structures, I don’t think Firmament leaves much of an impact. Between a thinly spread story and only a handful of genuinely juicy puzzles, it relied on its environments and atmosphere to hold my attention, and it absolutely did. I enjoyed my time with Firmament, perhaps more as a work of otherworldly tourism than a challenging puzzle game. Firmament’s Realms are picturesque and eminently screenshot-friendly. I only mention these blemishes because they’re distracting flaws in an otherwise stellar presentation. Some puzzles let me attach my Adjunct through solid walls, and the acid-battery puzzle allows its rotating bridges to clip through each other in particularly ugly fashion. ![]() Other times my character would easily step across a similar crack. I sometimes came to a jarring stop while walking around, looking down to find a gap of just an inch or two preventing my progress. ![]() The puzzles I enjoyed least were three-dimensional scavenger hunts where the solution was simple, but required wiggling around to get the right line-of-sight to the next interaction point in some awkward spot. A couple were genuine brain-teasers (like one involving connecting circuit terminals in a giant acid-bath battery assembly, and another involving navigating a multi-car train through horizontal and vertical space), but several felt perfunctory, just using my Adjunct to chain together the right contact points within a single room. For the first time ever, I wished that a point-and-click adventure’s puzzles had been more complicated and obtuse. Firmament has no such excuse to fall back on. The Witness never had to give plausible mechanical context to its line-drawing challenges, and Resident Evil’s bizarre puzzle mechanisms are handwaved as being the work of eccentric architects and mad scientists. Every machine feels like it could be a real device and has a logical purpose tying into the overarching quest. One of Cyan’s stated goals with Firmament was to create a grounded, coherent setting, and it succeeded maybe too well. I puzzled my way through the entire adventure in a little under 10 hours with only a couple snags. One extends the range of the Adjunct, one lets you bounce your interface to targets out of direct reach, and one unlocks a handful of heavy-duty locks found later on. Simple and intuitive, complicated only by a couple of unlockable abilities given at the midpoint of each of the three realms. The interface on a huge quarry crane lets you cycle between three modes moving the arm forward/back, up/down, and extending/retracting the grabber, all done with just two buttons and the mousewheel. More complex machines let you pick additional interactions with the mousewheel. Each machine is controlled simply by twisting your Adjunct left or right (physically in VR, or Q & E on desktop) to control one linear function, whether it’s a door opening and closing, elevator rising or falling or something more esoteric. Point it towards anything interactive (clockwork sockets highlighted with blue paint) to tether your extending laser-cable to it, then start fiddling. It’s never a mystery as to when it's puzzle time: there’s no inventory management or pixel hunting in Firmament, just manipulating big steampunk machines with the Adjunct gauntlet. ![]()
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