Firmament doesn’t fail and frustrate by presenting a rusting, broken landscape in need of repair.
#The first firmament series
Even Obduction’s most gleefully fiendish series of pure puzzles ultimately had a place in their world: They were a gauntlet designed to keep invaders away from something precious. These were ramshackle places, the lonely strongholds of an isolated few, suspicious of outsiders. But from there, the game frequently becomes a slog - a tedious series of trial-and-error endurance tests that have you running back and forth, over and over, with a lot of eyeballing and guesswork.Ĭyan’s previous puzzles made sense in the context of their environments. The first one gives you all the tools and visual clues you need right in one place, and coalesces in the kind of intuitive leap of logic that makes games like this feel so rewarding. If only you had something more worthwhile to do with it.įirmament has one weakness, but it’s a doozy: Too many of the puzzles, especially in the early going, aren’t great.įirmament has one weakness, but it’s a doozy: Too many of the puzzles, especially in the early going, aren’t great.
The Adjunct is just a ton of fun to use, and lends FIRMAMENT a more interactive feel than the somewhat ghostly presence you occupied in Cyan’s earlier games. Leave it to Cyan, famously death-free and nonviolent, to pioneer the first-person tooler. (Note: You will actually fix plumbing in this game.) It’s like if you actually used Bioshock’s famous pipe wrench to fix leaky plumbing. Andrew, and rocky island Juleston - to find upgrades for the Adjunct that give it enjoyably dorky new abilities.“Concatenated socketing” never stops sounding vaguely filthy, and I’m here for it. You’ll spend most of the game’s initial phase making your way through three realms - wintry Curievale, verdant St. With a few simple and intuitive controls, you can use sockets to open doors, move elevators, operate heavy machinery, and much more. Mentor wastes no time introducing you to your Adjunct, a hand-worn gadget that shoots out a plug, connected via a shimmering laser lasso, to access the functions of various sockets throughout the game world. That’s a bold and truly funny choice for the game - but it also feels a little like FIRMAMENT is trolling you. Mentor just keeps shrugging, nonchalantly mentioning how she’ll let you figure things out for yourself, or commenting on how frustrated and confused you must feel while completely refusing to help you. In other games, your disembodied helper voice can’t stop giving you hints and directions about where to go or what to do next. Mentor is a young, entirely over-it French woman, and her personality gives the game just the right touch of humor. That’s an intriguing hook for a character, and a fun callback to Myst’s notoriously unreliable narrators. Upon waking from your frosty nap, you’re greeted by a sort of digital ghost known only as Mentor - and literally the second thing she tells you is that she’s going to lie to you. Considering that you’re released from cryogenic sleep with your memory wiped to find their labors abandoned and in disrepair, things presumably didn’t go too well. While Irrational Games’s classic Ayn-Rand-‘em-up critiqued Objectivism and its emphasis on selfish gain at all costs, Firmament sets up a world of collaborative workers who shun avarice to pursue a mysterious common goal.
Indeed, the game seems to be in an intriguing conversation with the ideals and politics of its more famous and murdery predecessor. With its brass-intensive, steampunk-deco environments, Firmament feels a lot like Bioshock, except, you know, pleasant.
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