Firmament

I really want to like this one but i feel that 1) It's too short, i completed the game in just over five hours compared to the near 15 hours I took to complete Obduction (the developer's previous game) 2) The way the narrative is told just sucks, the narrator doesn't say anything of actual importance until at least half way through the game and maybe i missed it but i couldn't find any books or diaries outside of one in the hub area of the game. I really was hoping for more story or character interactions and less 'We are keepers and we keep the realms but I am sad and I have been changed and this one guy is evil but we are good'. I still have no idea what the Keepers were actually doing. 3) The puzzles are a bit too easy and also tedious to complete. Without spoiling anything all i can say is I despise the underwater section. That said, I did enjoy the Adjunct as a mechanic, it felt pretty good getting the upgrades and I did enjoy the ending, I just wish there was more meat to the game and the story was more interesting. Not a bad game (little bit pricy at $50AUD for 5 hours of gameplay) but it was disappointing after waiting all this time.

Firstly I want to say that I love Cyan and I will always bak them up. But I must be a little objective there. Cyan is known for its incredible storytelling and narrative environment, "show don't tell", Stories with choices and treasons. Unfortunately, this is not the case here. I was not thrilled by the story, and it's almost narrated by a voice over. There's some touch of narrative design here and there, but very few. The puzzles were classic human-size rubik's cube machineries, not too hard. I'm a little disappointed that I didn't had the need to have a booknote with me. There were some collisions bug that got me almost soft locked BUT : THERE IS A RESET PUZZLE OPTION IN THE SETTINGS (I write this in capital 'cause I read some people saying they needed to start again the game from zero, this is not necessary if you get stuck) So it would be better if there were no bugs, but at least we can escape with this option.

I posted my whole rant in the game forum with the same title (Rant review about the game - It didn't fit in the char limit of gog reviews). SPOILERS AHEAD: It is a DRY and souless game. And I really feel bad saying this... I felt I was playing a walk simulator with puzzles that wanted to be difficult and creative, but with NO sense at all in the place and story they were put at. To play sudokus, you play The Witness, these types of games are not just about the puzzle but about creating a believable place and a story to engage with. After a couple of puzzles everytime I reached another place where you sense "ah, this is going to be another puzzle place", it was yet another complex puzzle with no justification at all and something you didn't even know WHY you had to solve it. All placed just because, forced to be difficult and had no meaning or purpose at all for the people living there. ANY of the mechanisms, blockages, made sense at all, difficult just because. Nothing to give you a sense of living in a real place where people actually lived and worked. Just 3d assets and environments scattered, a screensaver. The battery, the camelus, the elevators placed in weird places, rooms that are absolutely empty, the pointless huge buildings and transport spheres, that end up being... empty buildings with NOTHING inside, no closed doors, no rooms you can't reach, just passages full of cables, pipes, glass constructions, grand designs... and a SINGLE connector / button to push, at the end; Stupid blockages like a 1 meter jump, or missing stairs or paths up the hill, stairs going nowhere, buildings with huge art nouveau constructions with no justification at all, a bunch or rocks that a normal person would jump over, who designed all this?? If I was a guardian, WHY would these people would design it all like this?? Why no rooms?... doors with open mechanisms only on one side? places you can only reach after doing a very complex puzzle. (...)

PC: 7950X, 6800XT (1440p), 32GB DDR5, SSD. VR: Reverb G2v2 There's no way to NOT compare to Cyan's legacy - especially Obduction. I played Myst on Windows 3.1 and all the subsequent games. I was also a KS backer. First playthrough on monitor was smooth w/minimal bugs (post Patch 1). VR is obviously demanding on HW, but even with settings turned down, it never felt smooth and had a mild nauseating effect (very rare for me). Everything looked great in VR, but movement was the issue (at least for me). -POSITIVES- *Great visuals and scale, and thoughtful level design. *The visual effects, although minimal, were well done. *Controls were reasonable. Also see negatives regarding the Adjunct. *Voice acting was fine. *Apart from obvious sci-fi things, the "science" of the puzzles was reasonable. *The lack of handholding was good. *Ending was okay but predictable (despite meaningless walking). -NEGATIVES- *For a Cyan game, puzzles were TOO DAMN EASY! ..like tasks to move to the next point in journey. Great if your IQ level makes these puzzles a challenge. I expected a lot more! *No clues before release that this PUZZLE game was for casuals and wouldn't feature thought-provoking puzzles. *Puzzles were not built around discovering and piecing exploration clues together. More so "here's a mechanism that you need to do something with". *The Adjunct seemed like a cop-out for creating more realistic controls. *World felt mostly lifeless. *Nothing interesting was done with "The Swan". I kept looking for changes or clues after progressing other sections. *Story was delivered through a handful of books and sparse narration. *Excessive reuse of the title logo throughout. Ran out of $$ or creativity? It became distracting. *Short and underwhelming. *Release was in a somewhat buggy state like it was rushed - odd for Cyan. -SUMMARY- *Buy on sale if you want a walking simulator with nice visuals + light puzzles - not in the same class as Obduction. VR implementation is lacking.

For the full price, the game took only about 8 hours to complete. The extra hours were because of bugs causing me to lose all progress and being forced to start over (You only get 2 save slots and an autosave, and loading a save always overwrites the autosave.) There are still a few graphical bugs but overall the quality and frame rate held up wonderfully. For some reason it detects my NVIDIA as an AMD, which probably would have caused me all sorts of graphics grief if I hadn't caught and fixed the mistake. Except for a couple of puzzles that were badly tutorialized, the vast majority of the puzzles were a nice slow build on previously taught concepts. (This is kind of standard with Cyan. I remember the final puzzle in Myst having a pull lever that had never been used anywhere else and I had no reason to know it... it took me forever to figure that one out.) Sadly, I didn't think the atmospheric items (the stuff that lives in the rooms and landscapes that you play in) lived up to the same level as in the Myst series. There's only a couple of actual books to read and most of the story is told by a voice narrator. This worked for me, but it might not work for everyone. It was not overbearing (for me) at all but it's a noticable departure from the Myst series. I saw influences in this game from other games over the last 20 years. Little nods to other successful properties. I feel sad that I caught so many of the references. Not as much wonder when you can look at something and say "I know where that comes from." It was one of the things with Myst that was so awesome. Ultimately, I enjoyed it and I'd recommend it.