Counterpoint on Firmament — Reading Through the Negative Reviews

Introduction

Komugi's review of Firmament read the gap in temperature between praise and pans. Loud negatives, quiet positives. It's a sharp piece of analysis, and she landed on a stern 6.5 herself. So what I went looking for wasn't 'the praise Komugi missed.' It's a blunter question: should you buy this thing right now?

Steam calls it Mostly Positive — 72% of 1,630 reviews as of August 2026, with 462 negative. Not a bad number on its face. But sort by Helpful and the picture shifts, as Komugi already noted. I focused on those 462 negatives and re-read the complaints she'd filed under 'design theory,' this time asking a shopping question instead.Firmament — official Steam store asset

What the Negative Reviews Say

The first thing that jumps out among the negatives is the puzzles themselves. Turning cranes and generator sockets with the wrist-mounted 'Adjunct' gets called 'tedious infrastructure puzzling' by more than one reviewer. The complaint repeats: you see the solution the instant you look at it, and then the actual cranking just drags on. Several note the tool upgrades were 'never used in combination,' which feeds a sense the game never really deepens.

The second claim is about story. With no ciphers or number systems, several reviews point out there are essentially two readable books, scattered around the map in copies of themselves. One pan dismisses it as 'a VR tech demo with a story bolted on afterward,' and the veterans especially mourn the loss of the 'the world itself tells the riddle' feel that Myst and Riven built.

Third is bugs and price. Even now, reports keep surfacing of cranes, ice, and elevators freezing mid-use, plus falls caused by catching on railings. Cited playtimes run roughly 5 to 13 hours against a price near $35. 'Expensive for the length' lands harder stacked next to the bug reports. And because this game raised money on Kickstarter under a 'VR-first' banner, complaints about VR instability read less like grumbling and more like a promise-breach protest.An abandoned steampunk realm — Steam screenshot

Examining #1 — Is 'Tedious' a Fair Verdict?

'Tedious infrastructure puzzling' is, by the lineage's own standards, half right. Firmament's verb set narrows to essentially one thing: plug in and turn. Where The Witness made noticing the verb, Firmament asks for no noticing at all. The gap between the moment you solve it in your head and the time it takes your hands to execute it — that gap is what 'tedious' is actually naming.

But this isn't Firmament's sin alone. Riven, too, was full of wiring and mechanism puzzles, and 'busywork' complaints existed even then. The difference is that Riven bracketed that busywork with another verb — observe, record. Firmament let go of the observing verb and kept only the executing one. So I'd call 'tedious' an accurate symptom report, not an exaggeration.

Examining #2 — Thin Story, and the VR Promise

On the thin story, Komugi already granted it as 'the inevitable downstream of a lowered observation resolution,' and I agree. But I'll add one thing: thinness itself isn't the crime. Gorogoa proves a game can work with almost no text. The problem is that Firmament drops capitalized terms like 'Keeper' and 'Threshold' into the world and never explains what they mean. It reads less like restraint and more like a story that got dropped partway through.

As for the VR promise, I think this is less a design-taste argument than a matter of a deal kept or broken. Kickstarter backers funded a 'VR-first' new work, and instability reports in VR kept surfacing after launch. Outside reviews also flag the scarcity of physically movable objects and rougher VR-mode polish. What's defensible as a design choice and whether backers were told the truth are two different axes, and I think they should be scored separately.

Where I Agree

Where I agree with the pans is the combination of price and bugs. Roughly 35 dollars for 5 to 13 hours is a fine price if the bugs are rare, but with reports of cranes and ice freezing still surfacing well after launch, I can't recommend paying that price for it as it stands today. The fact that the developer had to add a 'revert to last save on a bug' option tells you how deep the problem runs.

The other thing I agree with is the loss of Cyan's identity. As Komugi put it, the studio let go of the signage of 'the book and the observing eye,' and anyone who's followed the Myst lineage will feel that texture missing. This isn't a blind spot Komugi missed — she already went there — but I'd push one step further and call it not a design choice but a sign taken down. If you're taking the sign down, the work itself should have said more about why.

Where I Push Back

That said, I don't sign onto the flat 'tedious infrastructure puzzling' verdict. Narrowing to a single tool genuinely removes the kind of pixel-hunt unfairness other adventure games suffer from, and most of the pans themselves grant the vistas and that first-minutes goosebump. Having few verbs and having shallow verbs are, in principle, two separate complaints, but most negative reviews swing at both at once.

'A VR tech demo with a story bolted on' also overstates it, I think. The VR-first design decision genuinely explains the no-notes, no-embedded-clues choices — that's intent, not an accident. Missing your target and having no target aren't the same thing. I'd rather treat Firmament's aim as a failed experiment than write it off as a failure with no aim at all. It's too soon to call it that.

Sources

This piece draws on Steam's aggregate review data as of August 2026 (per Steambase: 1,630 total, 1,168 positive, 462 negative, 72% positive), a read-through of Steam's negative reviews sorted by Helpful and by Recent, and PC Gamer's review (Dominic Tarason). Individual review claims are aggregated and paraphrased rather than quoted verbatim.

Closing — Who It's For, Who It Isn't

To sum up: Komugi landed her stern 6.5 as a matter of design theory. I stand close to that same spot, but I land a little differently. I agree on price, on bugs, and on the loss of Cyan's identity. I push back on the 'tedious' and 'tech demo' write-offs, which I think confuse an experiment that missed its aim with a failure that never had one.

So here's the buying advice. If you're new to this kind of puzzle-adventure, or you value simply walking a meditative landscape for its own sake, it's still worth recommending. If you're a veteran chasing the 'observe and synthesize' pleasure of Riven or Obduction, or a Kickstarter backer who was promised the VR experience itself, the current bug reports say: wait for a sale, or skip it. A more practical verdict than Komugi's, if you want one — this isn't a 'don't buy it,' it's a 'not yet.'A scene from Firmament — Steam screenshot