Recommended (With Reservations)

As one of the Kickstarter backers for this game, I went in with big expectations. The story of this game's release is one of perpetual setbacks and delays, and when the release was drawing near at the end of last year and an update was pushed to the backers that the game had to be delayed again because it wasn't ready for release, I had a sense that... well, at least the game will be done when it releases. We've waited 3 years, what is another six months?

The answer is, surprisingly, not much. Not that the additional wait was odious, but that ultimately what was released was still quite unfinished.

Other reviews have already mentioned the game-breaking glitches, the lack of polish, and just the general beta-version vibe that Firmament has. Those issues are not terribly important to me, in spite of having to restart my game a third of the way in due to a game-breaking glitch involving bad hit detection on a moving platform yeeting me into the void combined with an overzealous autosave function. As frustrating as those issues are, they will eventually be patched out. It is both the blessing and the curse of modern development cycles that no game is quite done until after the initial release, sometimes years later.

No, when I say unfinished what I mean is that this is still only half a story. Beware spoilers ahead.


Listen, I love Cyan. In the "I got Myst as a kid and made it part of my personality" sort of way. I wanted to like this. I wanted to like it so much. The inability of this story to maintain even the faintest suspension of disbelief is just... heartbreaking.

It's "The League of Extra-Ordinary Gentlemen," in space. Yeah.

Yeah.

Firmament takes place in an alternate history game of Sid Meier's Civilization where you somehow managed to unlock regenerative stasis pods and orbital rail guns before dot matrix printers. Nikolai Tesla, Jules Verne, Marie Curie, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, and Andrew Carnegie teamed up to create a privately funded, multi-national space agency that spent a decade launching supplies into orbit with massive rail guns, then assembling a space ship in-orbit and sending it cruising along with steam power and solar sails, planning all the while to upgrade the ship in-transit as technology improved.

And all of this was made possible with the clever use of space communism and class warfare.

No really, that is the story.

And listen, I'm not here to debate the merits of that narrative space. I'm sure people much more clever than I could write a 20 page thesis about Marxist interpolations of zero-gravity class warfare. But consider the drop off in narrative complexity and world-building that occurs from "A hidden race of people who can build bridges to previously unknown worlds using special materials and writing techniques" to "A political schism about whether those worlds are being created from whole cloth or if they always existed and we're merely visitors" to "Lets discuss the long-term consequences of colonialism and plunder as a vicious cycle with Professor Brad Dourif" all the way through to Obduction which had a certain amount of Sky-Craning but still presented the same pattern of disparate worlds choosing between conflict or harmony... just to wind up at The League of Extraordinary Space-gentlemen.

That, in a nutshell, is my biggest problem with this game.

Certainly, the game has many, many opportunities to take that narrative and expand upon it. If my description of it is annoyingly simplistic, that is only because the implementation is simplistic in turn. There are so many missed opportunities to do more visual story telling, to give the Firmament depth and texture and make the things that go on there meaningful to the player. And they just... don't. There's a room with the names of the 12 keepers painted on the wall but only one that we encounter passively. It didn't have to be that way. There are two non-narration journals from the terminally French Keeper ghost and only two other significant instances of passive story-telling in the entire game... one being the keeper's bedroom that shows signs of a violent struggle, and the other being the state of the seed vaults.

In a lot of ways, the designs lack Cyan's signature fantastical nature as well. The Omnisphere is shaped like a gyroscope but the tracks are all vertical and your view directly in front of or directly behind where it is travelling is obstructed. I feel like that would have benefited from the tracks looping and spiraling with the passenger cabin remaining level, letting the player take in the vistas. If whimsical roller-coasters are a Cyan staple, the Camelus segment is a gamble that fails miserably.

There is a twist at the end about the player's identity that doesn't mean anything because we (the player) were not actually that person. It's a wholly ineffective narrative device that accomplishes nothing, especially considering that there is only one ending. Cyan games are notable for their meta-narrative space. Yes, you've got puzzles to solve and Firmament has no shortage of those, but beyond those puzzles the passive storytelling is giving you clues about the world, who you are, where you fit in, and ultimately you have to make a decision based on how well you've interpreted and understood the meta-narrative. You start Myst by knowing the story moves forward when you collect a red or blue page, and collect enough meta-narrative information to ween yourself from that task when appropriate. Riven drops you in the middle of a familial and ideological conflict and asks you to both choose a side and to be observant enough to unlock the true ending. Exile's meta-narrative space asks you to find empathy for a character who is willing to straight up murder you until seconds before the credits roll. Obduction leaves the fate of entire worlds up to the player's capacity for puzzle solving and compassion.

Firmament has a three minute exposition and a VNV Nation song. So, y'know, one out of two ain't bad.

There were so many opportunities to slowly reveal the nature of the cargo worlds, to tell a story visually and passively, and to make the hours and hours of backtracking and puzzle-solving meaningful by asking the player to make a choice based on how they've interpreted the story. And it just... doesn't do that.

Alright, so, that's a lot of complaining. But still recommended? Yeah. Because I think ultimately the game still delivers on what most people will be expecting when they hear that a new Cyan game has released. Its beautiful, its strange, it's 7-10 hours of confused backtracking and puzzle-solving.

It just could have been so much more than that, and that kinda hurts.