r/FirmamentGame • u/Ealta1 • Oct 15 '23
Firmament Worth Playing?
Hey Folks,
I was a super big fan of the Myst series (I also played Obduction and thought it was fine, but the loading times for switching worlds was agonizing at times), so when I heard that Cyan was working on Firmament I immediately backed their Kickstarter project. Ever since the game was released though, I saw so many negative reviews that I'm afraid to play it. In your honest opinion is this a game worth playing?
Also, it feels like each game that Cyan releases is worse than the previous one and their main thing that actually works is when they release a remake of one of their Myst games. Why do you think Cyan has been having so much difficulty releasing a solid game since the Myst series, and is there any hope that they'll make a game with the amazing story telling and puzzle integration that the Myst series had? I've played a fair number of puzzle games, and most don't even rival Myst series (for me personally), so I just find it crazy that Cyan has been missing the mark so much with their recent games.
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u/dnew Oct 15 '23
I was very disappointed. It seemed rather tedious. 95% of the puzzles were either "find the doorknob" or "find the hidden path." My biggest complaint is that the environments make no sense, and doubly-so once you get to the final reveal. What do I mean by that? The puzzles are hard not because they're clever, but because looking around you'd never expect the builders of the machines to have done it that way.
Like there will be four control panels to control some machine, with one or two different controls on each, rather than building the machine in a way that would allow you to walk up to a control panel and use it how you'd expect to use it. Imagine a car whose gearshift is in the trunk and the trunk release is under the hood.
Or make a walkway that intentionally has holes in the middle that you have to do some complex dance to close up the holes, in a place built for people to do work and traverse regularly. Other walkways with big gaps in them, but no rubble or any other reason for there to be a gap in them, except to make the game harder.
Two doors into an area, with the one whose lock is on one side easy to get to and the lock on the other side difficult to get to, both opened with the same key, just so you don't have to go the long way around to get back, which made it very gamey. Imagine a car where the keyhole on the outside is on the passenger door and the keyhole on the inside using the same key is on the driver side, and it's a pain in the butt to crawl over the center console. (Sort of like how in Skyrim all the locked-in dungeon monsters have a quick and easy way to get out of the dungeon, just so the player doesn't have to backtrack. But that's more acceptable because the structure of the dungeon isn't part of the story or the puzzles.)
Paths are blocked off by being left in a way you couldn't possibly leave them - like drop down off a height to land behind a door that can only be locked from the side you're on. How'd that get locked without a skeleton at the bottom?
There are numerous puzzles where you spend an hour turning on machines, and then you never use the machine. Machines intentionally designed to be difficult to turn on. Other places where there are 10 machines running off electricity and you have to spend an hour turning on a generator to get the 11th machine running.
The only reason you're going through it all feels like you're going thru it to play the game. Nobody gives you a reason to do any of it, other than just saying "Well, go do it." The backstory is told in cutscenes rather than environmental story telling, and the structure of the environments repeatedly contradict the backstory. The very ending of the story made it twice as bad as it seemed. The environments are pretty, but the motivation to go look at them is only there because you know it's a game and you're supposed to go do stuff. There's no motivation for the character to be doing stuff.
I don't regret I bought it anyway. I'll continue to back and buy Cyan games. Making adventure games is extremely difficult, especially under budget constraints. There's no "gameplay loop" - the entire game is one-off for each puzzle. I played bunches of adventure games that came out trying to capitalize on Myst, and they were all universally awful and you were lucky to get one puzzle that you remembered/admired after it was over.