Firmament

I went into Firmament half-expecting a nostalgia trap, a studio coasting on the long shadow of Myst. What I got was something stranger and more earnest: a first-person puzzle-adventure that commits so hard to one central idea that the whole game rises or falls on whether you find that idea compelling. You play as a Keeper, a maintenance worker waking up to find every realm abandoned, guided only by a ghostly Mentor whose motives are not quite what they seem. The three realms you must restore - Curievale, an ice quarry and steam plant; Juleston, a sulphur mine and acid battery complex; and St. Andrew, a lush overgrown conservatory - are connected by Conveyance Pods through a central hub called the Swan. Each one is a distinct, brooding world, and collectively they make up one of the most atmospheric environments Cyan has ever rendered. The mechanic holding all of this together is the Adjunct, a wrist-mounted gauntlet you use to tether into sockets scattered across every machine in every realm. It opens doors, drives cranes, couples and uncouples train cars across two axes of track, lowers bridges, pilots harvesters through open terrain, and eventually gains three upgrades that expand its range, torque, and ability to chain multiple sockets together. The device is genuinely clever, and a handful of puzzles - the giant mixer in Juleston, a crane sequence that makes you feel appropriately tiny, the harvester vehicle runs across open terrain - land with real satisfaction. The problem is that because every single puzzle uses the same physical gesture, the solution space narrows considerably compared to prior Cyan work. There is no hidden language to decode, no notation worth scrawling on paper. For newcomers to the genre, that makes Firmament the most welcoming entry point Cyan has ever made. For veterans who want Riven-level mental architecture, it may feel like a gentle afternoon rather than a proper reckoning. The soundscape, to its credit, does everything the narrative does not. Machine hum, wind across vast structural spans, footsteps ringing off metal and stone, and a score that drifts in and out like weather - it all builds something genuinely melancholy and beautiful. The Mentor's voice is a quiet, recurring presence rather than a hand-holding guide, speaking when you enter new areas and going silent the rest of the time, which preserves the loneliness Cyan has always been good at. The world-building lands in the visual register more than the literary one: journals and books are sparse compared to past games, and the broader lore feels thinner than the architecture deserves. The story's final reveal is either a quiet gut-punch or an anticlimactic shrug, depending entirely on how much you have invested in the atmosphere along the way. Honestly, the roughest part of Firmament's story is not the narrative but the launch state. Early players encountered save corruption, softlocks, crane bugs, and puzzle resets that ate real time. Patches have landed since, and the consensus from people returning months later is that the experience is meaningfully smoother now. The Mac port still carries a reputation for performance hitches on the loading screen and throughout play, so Windows is the safer path on PC. VR support exists and uses both free-roam and teleport modes with comfort options, but it has been called rudimentary by most who tried it - the non-VR flat-screen version is where this game actually lives. At somewhere between eight and fifteen hours depending on puzzle tolerance, it knows roughly when to end, and the finale has genuine visual ambition. This is a game for people who can sit with silence, who find abandoned machinery haunting rather than boring, and who do not need a puzzle to humiliate them to respect it.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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