Look, if I read this review I wouldn't believe it either. I have been a huge Cyan fan my whole life. This game is quite frankly shocking. I am so disappointed and I my expectations were already very reasonable. It might be good for generating wallpapers, but I find it hard to say much else positive. I was a kickstarter backer and I knew it was going to be late and probably small, but I was okay with another Obduction. This is significantly less than Obduction. While How Long to Beat clocks Obduction in at around 13 hours, Firmament comes in at just 8.5. And it isn't just about the quantity, but the quality of the time spent. The worldbuilding is almost non-existent. The bugs make many puzzles very tedious - I had to restart and load previous saves when I got permanently blocked or the game just stopped working entirely. The story had a lot of potential, but it never really went anywhere. They threw in a "twist" that was so small and predictable that I assumed it was going to be a mid-game reveal and not the finale. And really that's how I felt about the game. It is like half of a game. Where is the other half? The half with the rest of the story and gameplay? They generated in-game journals and lore using AI, and while in the future that will probably be the norm - but this is supposed to be a handcrafted game about story and exploration. There's not that much content in it, there's not that much writing in it, and yet they created filler for it?? How?? 5 years for this?? In the VR world as a tech demo, it is probably ok, maybe even good. But as a real game, it fails to deliver. Pick it up on deep discount if at all. I'm sorry Rand, I can't recommend this and I don't know how it could be fixed.
I've been playing this for a couple of hours, and it's really pretty. However I have to log a dissenting review on this game because I just am not finding it enjoyable in the least. The first thing that struck me is how bad the writing is. Every single character including the player provied dialog options are full of idiotic decisions. I get that there's supposed to be some kind of infighting going on, but pretty much every character turns on their allies as quick as possible. Raynor is supposed to be a long-time friend and is very concerned about your survival at the beginning but immediately treats you like garbage and gloats about outranking you. The "commander" doesn't show up during the prologue or have any visible interactions and is blamed for everything to get the plot going, when it's clear that the ship captain did a bunch of stupid things. It's hard to get invested in the a universe full of people who are so self-defeating. Let them be destroyed for all I care. The voice acting is fine, not great. The art style is fine not great. Some parts are volice acted, others aren't. Male characters have super close up pictures and female characters get zoomed out portraits to show off their clevage. I mean that's just blatent. The menus, UIs, and interaction screens are distractingly ugly and inconsistent. Sometimes disabled options are greyed out, sometimes they blink but you can't click on them? What? The controls are awful, even remapping things doesn't help because of the way the game expects you to interact with everything. UI elements moving around. Ugh. Gameplay? What gameplay? There's clearly going to be more mechanics opening up later sure. But the stuff at the begining is not fun. I've played a lot of space shooters, traders, and 4X games. Freelancer to Homeworld to EVE Online. And this doesn't hold a candle to any of them. Maybe I'm missing something here, but I find this a joyless slog.
I like "walking simulators" and exploration games but this one just annoyed me. After playing for a little while I suddenly realized where the plot was going and how clever the writers seemed to believe they were. I did a quick search to verify my suspicions and uninstalled it. There was nothing else about the game but that basic twist, and once I figured it out, chasing down the rest of the red herrings felt tedious and annoying because none of it would matter anyway. Decent pretty, some neat creepy scenes, a couple of okay puzzles but so not worth the time played.
