Soundtrack: Firmament — the memory of one synth, filling a rusted planet

Introduction — the first sound the wrist-tool touches

You are dropped alone into a mining ruin of nothing but cracked pipes and frozen scaffolding, and the moment you plug the wrist-worn tool, the Adjunct, into a socket, a crane groans — and behind it, a processed synth drone slowly fills the air. In this new Cyan Worlds title, which Komugi's review called 'a meditative first-person world with no ciphers and no notes to take,' the music was written by Maclaine Diemer — by trade the longtime lead composer of Guild Wars 2, who joined Cyan in 2022 to score Firmament.

In his own words, the score is 'industrial ambient' (or maybe 'ambient industrial'). The tempo is, roughly, slow throughout, and almost everything you hear is synth — except for 'two or three' exceptions: an esraj, the bowed Indian string instrument, and a Fender IV (actually a Squier, though that only matters to people who know the difference). In a world of nothing but metal and ice, the handful of real strings that slip in support the planet's particular texture — abandoned, yet still bearing the mark of hands that once touched it.

From backer to composer — the hidden link

Diemer's first encounter with Firmament wasn't as its composer. It was in 2018, as one backer among many on its Kickstarter. He is enough of a genuine fan to count Myst among his own 'Mount Rushmore of games,' and was later invited to join Cyan as the composer for the very project he had once simply supported. Being a fan who backed a game, then later becoming the person who writes for it — that turn of events is itself the starting point of Firmament's music.

On top of that, the anecdote that he chose the 'same synthesizer' Robyn Miller once played for Myst and Riven echoes, almost as a mirror image, the composing method I traced in Miller himself for my earlier piece on Obduction. Miller found his melodies by playing along to footage of someone walking; Diemer instead picked up the very instrument Miller had used, and called back that same repeating, pizzicato synth timbre. Rather than imitating a style, he inherited the equipment itself — the 'vocal cords.' In Firmament's case, the hidden link between game experience and music isn't hidden in the story — it's hidden in the studio's gear rack.

A texture that fits the one-tool interaction — a puzzle-specific design

When you get down to it, there is only one thing you can do in Firmament: plug the Adjunct into a socket and work a crane or generator. As the story progresses, its torque and reach grow, but what grows is the strength of what you can do, not the variety. The three realms you visit — the ice mine of Curievale, the sulfur mine and power station of Juleston, the greenhouse of St. Andrew — each have their own texture, but the interaction itself stays just as simple throughout.

A score built almost entirely from synth suits this structure of 'one tool, repeated across different places' well. Rather than changing instrumentation wholesale from world to world the way Obduction does, Firmament sounds as if it keeps the same sustained texture throughout and only shifts the overtones and amount of reverb mixed in from realm to realm — my own reading is that this carries forward Cyan's tradition of dressing each world in its own sound, reshaped this time around a single recurring tool. For a game built on reusing one tool again and again, changing how a sound is mixed may land better than simply adding more instruments.

Analogy — the instant of plugging in, and the note that begins to sound

I have a habit of measuring every piece of music in BPM, but Firmament's score sits better when you grasp it by 'how fast it fills up' rather than by beat. There is that one beat of a pause between plugging the Adjunct into a socket and the crane starting to move — the player just waits there, operating nothing. The synth drone has exactly the same shape: what matters isn't the volume itself, but the time it takes for overtones to layer in and 'fill up.'

In terms of the analogy between a puzzle's solving tempo and a piece of music's tempo, this is music that puts 'the few seconds it takes to fill up' in the lead role, rather than 'the instant of achievement.' Plug in, wait, move — a fade-in drone suits this three-beat repetition well. The riddle itself may be simple, but because the music stretches out and lets you hear the 'gap' before the mechanism responds, the monotonous repetition starts to feel almost like a ritual.

Tracks worth hearing

If just one, then Ascent to Curievale ↗ (from the official label channel 'Emperia Records' on YouTube). In the single cue for stepping into the ice mine, you can clearly hear the synth drone gradually filling up.

To keep listening, there's Juleston ↗, with the heavy texture of the sulfur mine, and The Spire ↗, laced with the tension of climbing a tower (both on the same Emperia Records channel). For the whole album in one sitting, the composer's own Bandcamp (all 21 tracks, official) ↗ or the official Steam OST DLC ↗ gathers it all together.

Closing — what I would steal if I were composing

If I were to steal from this score, it would be the method itself: choosing the same instrument the previous composer used, and carrying its sonic memory forward as-is. Rather than studying a style and approximating it, you pick up the very same gear. It's less an impression of someone's voice than being lent the same vocal cords. When writing a new world that is neither a sequel nor a spin-off, bringing along just one piece of the previous work's 'sonic gene' — I want to try this kind of allocation in my own composing someday.

The other is the discovery that, for a game built around a single tool, changing how the same sound is mixed works better than simply adding more instruments. If you listen again, tune your ear to that one beat of a pause right after plugging the tool into a socket. Trace it back through Robyn Miller's Myst and Riven, and even Cyan's own Obduction, and you can hear how the memory of one synthesizer has been handed down.

Reference links

・Maclaine Diemer official Bandcamp: Firmament (Original Soundtrack) (all 21 tracks)

・Steam: Firmament - Original Soundtrack (official OST DLC)

・YouTube: Emperia Records official channel — Firmament (Original Soundtrack) by Maclaine Diemer (full 21-track playlist)

・WSHU Music, Respawn!: Maclaine Diemer's soundtrack for Firmament has Myst's DNA (backer-to-composer story, same synth as Miller)

・Level With Emily Reese: Level 225 — Maclaine Diemer (Firmament) ('industrial ambient', esraj/Fender IV instrumentation)

・Wikipedia: Firmament (video game) (release info, the Adjunct tool, the three realms)

・Wikipedia: Maclaine Diemer (biography, career at Guild Wars 2)