I’ve just wrapped up Firmament, the most recent game by Cyan Worlds, of Myst and Riven fame.
In a sentence, Firmament is extremely A Cyan Game. Maybe not quite as much so as Obduction was, but still.
I want to get this out of the way up front: the controls are more than a little jank, there are very few interactions in the world that snap-to-fit if you’re close to the solution and you can sometimes wedge yourself hard, even very early in the game. Playing the game with a console controller is really rough – ladders, oof – and if you can imagine the experience of driving a mech designed and built by the people who made Myst, that experience is exactly the experience you think it is.
But.
It is, first of all, beautiful.
As a built world it gives us an answer to, what if Bioshock’s Rapture but ecological, socialist and kind; that same commitment to Art Deco Scaled Beyond Understanding, but humane. At peace and in harmony with its surrounding space; not divisive, corrosive or cruel.
That alone makes it worth exploring. I’ve often said that the future I want will always be “designed by Sid Mead, soundtrack by Vangelis”, but there’s lots of room in my heart for towering, geometric aspirations made of brushed nickel, polished marble, brass patina and jazz.
In that beautiful space, the puzzles are intricate and the worlds are interconnected in a way that is frequently, and increasingly-rarely in modern games, frustrating – you will sometimes run into puzzles that you can get partway through and then get stuck on because you just don’t have the tool you need yet, and you need to find it that not nearby, but in a whole different part of the game. It helps to know Cyan well enough in these moments that you can trust that the answer’s discoverable and that backing out and exploring elsewhere, for now, is part of the Cyan experience.
And that’s the most interesting thing; like all Cyan games, Firmament absolutely refuses to patronize you. There’s no flashing icons telling you where to go next, no soaring dronecam shots that fly through environments as you enter them to show you where you need to go and how to get there, no subtle nudges towards solutions or next actions. You’re given a world-machine in some state of partial function, overgrowth or disrepair, and it’s up to you to even recognize that there’s a machine there at all.
This is so rare in modern games.
There’s a particular art, a school of thought to teaching people how to navigate a problem as they’re navigating it – of dissecting large, intricately built puzzles into minimal-case micropuzzles, presenting them to people as they explore, introducing the tools gently one by one before they arrive at the larger setpiece where they’re all brought together in some particular order, to some particular effect. I have a lot to say about “gamification” – a term and tool that’s largely fallen out of the discourse since the least interesting people in the world got their clammy hands on it and now github has cheevos, so gross – but this is the approach that Nintendo’s designers pioneered and have long since mastered, one that virtually every puzzle-dungeon developer of the last decade has adopted as gospel, intentionally or not.
Not Cyan, though. And their counterargument is crystalline in its simplicity: what if you don’t die?
It is somehow incredibly refreshing.
There’s no time pressure, no heath meter, no edges to step off accidentally, nothing that’s going to crush or spike or spring out to antagonize you. You will never have to press X to not die, or even run. And in exchange, all you have to do – all you can do, all you are obligated to do – is solve the world. You can manipulate the machine in any way it will allow as long as you like to no ill effect; you’ve got as much time as you want to bring to it. But the price of that is you’re on your own. It’s all on you to figure out. The tools are all there in the world, but the world will not help you; you don’t get so much as a map or even get fast-travel, apart from basically speedwalking. There’s you, the model of the machine you have in your head, and that has to be enough, because that’s all you’re getting.
But what a difference it makes, this rich sense of accomplishment when the secrets of the mechanism reveal themselves. The difference between “you have figured out this strange, beautiful problem on your own” and “you’ve been cajoled into turning the crank on the solution you’ve been given”. Its echoing absence in so many other puzzlers that insist on showing you how to solve the puzzle you’re given. It’s a negative space you can’t even tell is empty unless you have, in that instant, been a little bit full of that particular kind of pride, and of yourself. I don’t think anyone but Cyan is making games like this now; certainly the last time Nintendo made anything close was Ocarina’s notorious Water Temple. But the idea of a challenge not laid out for the gamer like a five course meal proved so heretical to the Nintendo dogma that it couldn’t be allowed to survive; the 3DS release of Ocarina’s Water Temple comes with traffic signals, and they’ve never looked back.
There are a lot of very, very reasonable criticisms you could make of this game. Beyond the controls (and again, by modern standards they’re pretty bad) the game often feels profoundly constrained by its mechanics – of which there are exactly two – leaving you with a sense they’ve built this beautiful puzzle world entirely out of doorknobs and a scrub brush specifically for cleaning doorknobs. There are some places where a machine whose larger purpose you are ostensibly seeking to understand winds up falling ass-backwards into an uncanny-valley-of-intent, showing up as a puzzling contraption here for the sake of being a puzzling contraption first, a machine of larger purpose a cold second, and the unvoiced echoes of possible gameplay you know were abandoned to ship-date expediency threaten to drown out the voice of the puzzle you’re solving. And like all Cyan games it feels like it ends too soon, too abruptly, with a twist that feels both plausibly foretold and vaguely dissatisfying.
But that’s Cyan, staying (frustratingly) in character; nothing easy, nothing simple, but nothing condescending, and then it stops. You get the world you get in its entirety, unapologetically opaque, as is. Figuring anything out at all – looking all over the place from every angle, noticing any little detail that lets you distill engine and purpose out of this cloud of architectures, connections, levers and signals – that is all on you. You can’t die; all you can do is look around, move and try to understand.
That moment of anticipated correctness, when you can see how it will come together and hold, when you know it’s going to work is so rare in gaming, so refined that it’s entirely understandable why the people who love it and seek it out – because what they are really loving in that moment is their own big-brained selves – get smug as hell about the experience, and the people who find it tedious and frustrating and not fun at all find it incredibly tedious and frustrating and absolutely not fun in the least.
It’s easy to see all the reasons somebody might bounce off of this game early. But if you – like me – are always looking for a clean, uncut hit of that Myst Island Feeling? This is your game.