Firmament

A strong taste of Cyan with an immersive, novel-like approach!

Compared to Obduction and previous games, this was a disappointment. If you play the Myst or Riven remakes and compare them to this (especially Riven), it's night and day. It's not that it's a bad game, but it's not a great one and I don't recommend it because you'd be better off replaying any of their other titles.

I didn't even finish it and considering how long I've been a fan of Cyan Worlds, that is damning.

I bought this game in the summer of 2024 and returned it due to a lot of graphical issues(shadows only appearing in one eye) that made the game unplayable. I saw they recently upgraded the game to unreal engine 5 and fixed a lot of the issues so I decided to give it another go

I'm so glad I did! The game has been a lot of fun so far(I think I'm close to the end). The puzzles have been easier than Obduction and a lot easier than Myst and RIven but I've still really enjoyed the game.

For me, the sense of scale is just so fun to see in VR. Cyan are masters at making cool worlds and crazy steam punk machines and puzzles. Little things like riding an elevator or looking out through the large glass windows at the top of a tower are just hard to describe.

There was some jank, and the game is definitely lacking in VR interactivity with the world(touching a wall, picking things up, etc.) however the interactivity and scope of the worlds do more than enough to suck you in

I think this game is a great gateway game into their other more difficult puzzle games.

I highly recommend Firmament!!

Another great game by the legendary Studio behind 'Myst'. Unlike their previous game 'Obduction', this one doesn't try to be a modern Myst, but instead tries to be its own thing, which is great.

Underrated Gem. Incredibly grand worlds to explore with eerie industrial vibes. The puzzles are slightly easier in this game than its predecessors, but they're still very well put together and will prove challenging for the average player. I also enjoyed the story very much, albeit not being as deep as its predecessors, it was still very captivating compared to your average game.. Firmament is another fantastic immersive experience from Cyan and will be enjoyed by new players of the genre and seasoned players alike.

Fun puzzles, not too difficult. Beautiful worlds. Bugs were few and far between.

Very short, finished in just under 7 hours (maybe less as I left it on pause a few times). Having played all previous Cyan games I found the difficulty fairly easy in comparison, the puzzles weren't very deep (I think limited by all interactions happening through your gauntlet), and only had a couple of moments where I had to take a moment to work things out.

Very nice looking and gives that Cyan exploration vibe we all love.

Only encountered one bug, but a reload fixed it.

Happy with the purchase to support the developers, but I got it on sale and would recommend others do the same.

Myst, But You're A Forklift Operator

I joke, but that's honestly what this game boils down to: about a dozen or so large-scale puzzles that have you operating heavy machinery. And I found these to be a lot of fun, and very inventive!

Outside the main puzzles, the game is a bit of a walking sim. That's just part of the Cyan Worlds vibe. (Still tho, do they have to insist on such LONG walks?)

The environments: fine. The story: fine. I don't think they were going for a grand vision of spectacle and lore. This game feels more like they simply had a solid mechanic for some great puzzles, so they slapped on a vibe and called it a game - and that works great for me! I think this smaller scope is a step in the right direction for Cyan.

Sorry, some nasty gliches, need to save often, need to reload often, game should get patches, there are no patches, final result: beautiful worlds, can't recommend.

Worst Cyan game ever. The story was the standard basic overplayed crap and the game play has no flavor.

Good game, but not for VR. Way too tedious to use the hand device and lots of walking.. plan to play in normal mode.

The game is gorgeous and the environments are fascinating.
I do however unfortunately think that this game fails to learn the lessons of Cyan's past projects.

i recently tried the remastered myst and riven, and i hope the reception of those releases inspires cyan to refocus.
This kind of tool-gimmick puzzler rarely works for me. I think the only tool puzzler i like is portal. I have tried many others and i don't enjoy them.

Its fun for a while, lots of back tracking and time wasting.

Visually quite stunning in parts, but I found it a bit tedious to play. The puzzles weren't very challenging, and it got quite repetitious - there was a lot of running back and forth between places with nothing to do except watch the same views over and over again. I also found the control interface (the so-called Adjunct) irritating and the key mappings (which you can't change) uncomfortable to use. It spoiled the game play.
The biggest problems for me, however, were the bugs - the game continually crashed, and in some passages of play (particularly the Camedus) you could inadvertently walk through walls and objects, leaving you stranded in a limbo state, unable to get back into the game. The devs are obviously aware of this - they have even provided a button in the Settings to allow you to rewind the game to a point before you stepped out of it! Never seen that before. I'd have been more impressed if they'd debugged the game properly in the first place.
The final insult is that at the finish, the game goes into an endless loop, forcing you to watch the whole list of credits, with no way of escaping other than to forcibly close the program down with Windows Task Manager.
I've been impressed with previous Cyan games, but this one is a disappointment, not very good and not very professionally executed.

an excellent puzzle challenge game.

Another great games from Cyan. This one is more concise than Obduction or Riven with less walking and more observation, but it is still pretty good and the VR aspect makes it of course awesome. The aesthetic is pretty interesting, with Soviet style architecture and sculptures. Highly recommend

The puzzles are tedious instead of fun, and don't respect you time. Buggy as hell too.

Very nice. The game was not long enough... I want to see the place the ship is going! GREAT JOB, CYAN <3

But for a couple of glitches in attempting to climb the ladder out of the derrick I found the game challenging and a lot of fun. I solved the ladder climbing problem by saving the game and then starting it again from the control panel. I didn't have to quit to get the glitch gone. Scenery is breath taking and difficulty is up there a bit. I recommend it highly.

absolute banger, beautiful enviroment, challenging puzzles and amazing story. PS the composer of the music slapps. would recommend if you enjoy puzzle games :)

I would wait for a discount, but it is truly a Myst like game, that is explore world while solving puzzle and for an unknown goal and reason.

I want more!

Yikes. Played this game a year and a half ago and it had some glitches but was mostly enjoyable. Glitches are now intolerable. Ice factory level keeps trapping me in control cabs (cannot go up the ladder to get out), forcing restart every time. Giving up. Shame, a beautiful world and superbly conceptualized. Alas...

Thank you so much for this amazing experience ! Epic story line, puzzles were not overly frustrating and made sense after trying at it for a while with maybe 5 or 6 times screaming " I figured it out ! " Just amazing story Thank you so much CYAN team !!!

great game from cyan. not without its hiccups, but still a great game for fans of the genere

Lame puzzles, uninspiring world. Super glitchy.

The puzzles are ok, only a few challenging ones. The game play is not really intended for PC users. I hit a couple of bad bugs, one that was so bad I had to revert to an earlier save losing 3 hours of game time.

Nice story and a beautiful world, but players coming from experiences such as Myst or Riven will probably be a bit disapointed by the lack of intellectually complex puzzles. Also, the whole game took me about 9h to complete, and that includes some technical difficulties with getting stuck in the world and having to reload a couple of times. Obduction was much more in line with the original style of the Cyan games.

What a game! What. A. Game.
Been a fan of Cyan games for many, many years since playing Myst way back in the early 90's. They have always produced beautiful, story-rich games, and this is no exception, this game is absolutely stunning!
The visuals are absolutely astounding, as one would expect from any Cyan game. Beautifully rendered into a fully realised world that feels real and believable along with a deep and intriguing story with one heck of a twist right at the end... and talking about the end... an astounding track by VNV Nation over the end credits just adds a whole new level of feeling and depth to the overall narrative. Honestly I can't praise this game enough.
There were one or two minor glitches when playing in VR, but nothing game-breaking or anything that spoiled the enjoyment of the experience. If this is the quality of any future games by Cyan, I am so excited for whatever comes next. I absolutely LOVE this game!!

I know this didn't get amazing critical reviews but if your are a Myst fan PLEASE play this. Some of the puzzles are a bit difficult and easy to over think but just keep it simple when solving and you will have a great time. I loved this game and I really hope Cyan continues to make games like it. Tell more stories cyan, yall are my heroes.

Pretty linear and the puzzles were fairly straight forward but fun. Most annoying issues are the bugs in the game, but otherwise I wish there was more choice at the end. Overall a short but decent game.

This is a leaning yes. It's not like I'd sit here and preach from the rooftops about this one.

Firmament is, at its heart, I think a solid idea. The story is fairly basic, but it works, and puzzles are puzzle gamey. The sound and music design is very well done, and the voice acting is... about on par for Cyan games in general, so... not the best, but it works. Graphically the game's great.

So why am I on the fence? Well, remember when I said puzzle gamey? About half of this game feels like a lived in area, where you're Myst puzzling your way past obstacles. They're not "there" per say, but you're getting around issues. And the other half is obtuse hunt and peck frustrating head scratching irritating obstruction, clearly for the sake of obstruction. It's not like Myst or Riven where you're trying to get somewhere and you're trying to weed through Atrus' mind to logic map the mechanical nonsense the guy's written to make this stuff work, you're finding frozen over connection points, and turning valves for hours on end, backtracking , and even walking from point A to B for the arbitrary reason the game wants you to do that for some inane feeling of connectivity and ability to hear more or less constant indoctrination as opposed to chasing a narrative. It's immersive, but it's immersive in the irritating sense. I got a real solid reminder of the ads you'd hear from TV's in electronics or a best buy, on loop every 15 minutes. I might hear some of the audio blurbs in my sleep.

Narratively, the game doesn't throw a surprise at you, and Weirdly, this game dumps 100% of the lore all at once, pretty much in the last 30 minutes. And what it does land is... pretty underwhelming. After great annoyance in two of the worlds. If you managed to plow through the second half of two of the worlds without any issue whatsoever, hats off to you. I kept having severe issues with noticing what I was intended to notice. Not sure why, but, 9 hour game sessions will do that I suppose. I flew through the first half pretty quickly in comparison. Either way after those worlds I was hoping for a lot more in depth information about characters, and really, I think you get a solid scratching of the surface. The narrative is just so... short story, in a game with so much potential for novels of lore. Heck, after big reveals the amount of backstory could fill a novel. But we get a small blurb, and one you could miss if you were hurried. The characters' effects are minimal, we only have one real voice to listen to, and they're a bit biased. There's so much limiting factors on what the narrative is, and the story is linear and not branchable. Unlike Obduction where you could get multiple endings dependent on your observance.

I don't think this game's bad. Honestly, I enjoyed it. But there's still quite some jank in the controls and interactivity, and I got stuck several times. Save often folks. All in all I think it's worth a few play sessions. Maybe keep a guide handy for especially stubborn natural 1's you roll for perception in real life. But not for more than 20 dollars. It's about 9 hours. Yeah, Myst can be beaten in a minute. Provided you've read for hours and watched or played it before and it was made 30 years ago. This one feels just way less glued together than Myst, Obduction, and others. Riven's much more cohesive, and far more rewarding too.

It probably sounds like I hated it. I didn't. There's just a lot to critique. If you like puzzle games, you'll like it. If you really like Cyan games... You actually might be let down. This one just needed something. I can't shake the feeling it feels incomplete. Despite that though, I enjoyed it for what I think it wanted to be, rather than what it was. Because what it was was really average. What it could have been was honestly a lot more, and I don't know why we have what we have instead of what could have been produced. It doesn't hit the heights of Obduction. Not even close. But honestly, it's still good enough to warrant a playthrough, just don't get on a hype train to do it, it's much better if you don't.

I really like this game as it was from a publisher that has made amazing puzzle games. The Firmament is a true adventure puzzle game as it is not focused on a specific set of puzzle creating elements or a set or class of specific puzzle types. Instead it is a story that you find yourself in and as you move through it, you find that you have to solve "puzzling situations". Not some specific and discreet puzzle. The rules of this world/worlds are clean and not at all complicated to understand and apply. Some common sense about how certain systems work will be helpful. Things like factory and electric systems workflows is a plus; but again common sense and the ability to try and re-try things is available and that will help you eventually find the solution to the next step.

This game is fairly linear, so there is a golden path that you should try and follow. This is good for some but I know that others prefer a much more free-flow of game play as they discover things at their own pace. Eventually, the game reveals itself as you make progress and there is good and timely rewards for achieving the "golden path" touchpoints.

Overall I really liked this game. Its not too long or complicated, but it is satisfying as a puzzle game that immerses you in a light story and world(s) with consistent supporting graphics and game play. This *is* Myst-like game play to be sure; but I would say up a few notches. Actually, up SEVERAL dozen notches, as Firmament rivals Cyan's "Obducttion" in graphics, complexity and general game play. Both are different experiences but a comparison between the two is better than one of Myst vs Firmament.

Finally, if you are a puzzle game enthusiast like myself, then "Firmament" is a must play. Not a big time commitment and it has a seemless puzzle flow that you will appreciate. No repetitive puzzles; though some patterns are there across the different areas of game play.

I think I read that this game was "very hard to complete". My experience is actually, totally the opposite. This game is a pleasure to play as it only requires common sense to figure-out and game progress to enjoy.

The game is beautiful, great vistas. Some decent puzzles.
Okay that's all the good things. It's buggy, the environments are huge and empty, there is terrible signposting, the story is almost entirely conveyed through a ghost nagging you and being mysterious, then telling you that you're terrible with a reveal that's... not really much of a reveal? The concept seems reallllly stretched thin.
The entire mechanical gimmick, that you have a universal tool to interact with equipment, just makes the whole game feel very copy paste, doing busywork or backtracking or running through painful unskippable cutscenes just to go to yet another node and hit Q or E. Nothing is satisfying; I just wanted to be done.
Really felt phoned in here, like maybe there were grander designs and they had to scale back, or perhaps it was just a small core idea and they had to make it more impressive to justify the price?
Get it on sale, if at all.

very good game

It's been a long time since I've actually finished a game to completion. I enjoyed it. A few puzzles gave me some issues and there were a couple of bugs, but I enjoyed every moment of it. Well worth my money and time. Thanks Cyan!

This Cyan puzzle game is on par with the rest of their stuff. Grand, desserted worlds. Some decent puzzles with lots of walking around. They are beautiful to look at, but there is too much walking around for my liking and too much real time is spent traversing the world instead of solving puzzles. I'd prefer more puzzle in a game with a circa 10 hour playtime. I prefer other puzzle games to Cyan ones, but this is still well worth playing if you enjoyed Cyan's other puzzle games.

TL;DR Worthwhile for 20 bucks or less. Wait for a sale.

I'm mixed on this one. The environments were nice but I didn't really like the story or the presentation by the narrator. The monologue sections were way too long and too disconnected from what's going-on to really care about - at least they were fully voiced. Puzzles were rather easy albeit sometimes a bit wonky. Your puzzle pieces can get stuck inside objects until you reload a save. The game was pretty short and took about 9h to 100%. No missable achievements.

Played this game shortly after the remake of Riven because I was hungry for more Cyan, and this gave me exactly that. I enjoyed every bit of the exploration, narrative, and world building without ever getting too stuck or frustrated on a puzzle. The effort that goes into Cyan's world design is on full display here with a detailed steampunk aesthetic, featuring really unique industrial facilities built into large natural landscapes. It's dope.

I mean. It's not Myst. There aren't many journals lying around for you to read to build some kind of deep lore around. Not sure if there's even a story, and I'm basically one puzzle away from the endgame, or at least being done with the red/blue/green worlds you already see in the trailers. The puzzles are more or less "figure it out, or don't". There's one chick talking to you about random things as you solve the puzzles, which seems to be the only motivation to do anything.

If you like VR or straight up puzzles, they're sure as hell pushing that. But there just seems to be something lacking in the story department. I'd still recommend picking it up since there's always the chance that they go back to the old Myst style formula and if you like adventure games, they seem to be about the only ones making anything close to good. They also seem to be pretty active now after making the Myst remake, this, and the Riven remake all in under 2 years. Hope they keep the ball rolling. And it wouldn't hurt if they published some books to go along with the games.

Excellent game! Cyan just keeps on getting better and better. Can't wait to see the next offering.

Beautiful game, but compared to Myst or Obduction, it misses the mark. The steampunkish nature to the puzzles is fun, but in all they're pretty easy to solve except for a few where you're just having trouble seeing the targets you need to spot.

The total number of puzzles is lacking as well. Really not a very long or difficult game. I finished the whole thing in under 10 hours and went back for another half hour to finish off the last 2 achievements i was missing for 100%

The story and world felt pretty lacking. I can see what they were going for, but it really feels like they put most of the budget into the visuals and didn't bother fleshing out the script.

Visually beautiful but not much to it. Happy I played it though, so I'm giving it a thumbs up. I wouldn't spend more than $20 on it though... or $10 if you're not a huge Myst or Cyan fan.

If you love Myst, and Riven, you should play this. Not as good as the other two, but still enjoyable to play, if you can look past a couple of the unintuitive puzzles that dont really help you out in solving them, along with not a lot of back story, thats only told to you through someone who is already dead every now and then. Now I havent finished the game yet, so maybe that will be touched on later, so we will see. I would say to wait for a sale to get this, but not at full price.

Another fun adventure from Cyan.

All right, I've finished the demo, what's next?

...wait, that wasn't the demo? That was the full game?

Its ok, but i was expecting something along the lines of riven or myst, but this is very surface level in comparison. Most of the puzzles are just logic. No notes or deeper thought is required to solve them. The only puzzles that took time was because one was figuring out math and routing of a circuit (that gets reset and you have to do again) and one was searching for switches. 5/10

Once I got into the flow of the game, I became completely immersed and thoroughly enjoyed playing.