REVIEW · 2023-05-18
Firmament
Reading the reviews of Cyan's single-tool first-person puzzler
First Impressions
I'm writing this not as a player but as a reader of the reviews stacked up on Steam. Firmament (May 2023) is the new game from Cyan Worlds, makers of Myst and Riven. The verdict is Mostly Positive — 72% of 881 Steam-purchaser reviews, with 1,159 positive and 452 negative across all 1,611 (snapshot 2026-07-24). On the number alone, a mild success.
But sort by Helpful and the landscape flips. The top reviews are almost all pans, and nearly every one is written by a self-described 30-year Cyan veteran or Kickstarter backer. Even the single most-upvoted review (236 votes) calls itself 'the softest of recommendations' while professing love for the studio. Behind the 72%, the loudest reviews lean toward disappointment.
So this isn't a game an average score can capture. A quiet majority and a long-form disappointed minority look at the same board and return opposite words. My interest is translating that split into Puzzlebyrinth's vocabulary — verbs, grammar, observation resolution, subtraction.
Firmament — Steam store key art
The World
One of the few points both camps agree on is how it looks. Positive or negative, reviews open by granting the breathtaking vistas and incredible architecture. One positive review says it 'reminds you why Myst was a big deal'; even the harshest pan concedes the genuine goosebumps of first stepping into The Swan. Walking the steampunk realms with no time limits and no deaths, press reviews called it 'meditative,' 'a peaceful journey.'
The trouble is that both camps also report the beauty doesn't last. Pans note the playable area is 'surprisingly small' despite huge vertical scale — 'Riven in 1997 was bigger.' Even the most thoughtful positive review admits the 'seams of budget cuts' in asset reuse and the near-absence of non-puzzle objects. Beautiful, but unpeopled; 'lifeless' and 'sterile' recur on the negative side.
In Puzzlebyrinth terms, this is a world with its observation resolution deliberately turned down. Where Riven and Obduction made 'notice a detail, write it down, use it elsewhere' the world's reason to exist, Firmament's world is there to be looked at, not solved. As one reviewer puts it: the worlds are pretty, but it doesn't matter, because all that matters is your multi-tool and the things you plug it into. Read that as liberation or as hollowness, and the verdict splits.
Firmament — Steam store key art
Putting the Mechanics into Words
The verbs here reduce to essentially one: plug the wrist-mounted 'Adjunct' into a machine's socket and turn, raise or toggle — that's it. There's no inventory, no cipher, no numbering system, nothing to write down. One positive review flatly calls it 'perhaps the first Cyan game that neither requires nor benefits from taking notes.'
The whole split lives on this one point. Positives welcome it: cutting to a single tool 'removes the frustration of pixel-hunting' and 'leaves pure logic'; it's 'a modernized adventure.' Negatives dismiss the same design as 'valve-swivelling,' where 'you see the solution instantly but implementing it is a tedious mess.' One pan nails it: the hard part should be solving in your head, not carrying it out.
In Puzzlebyrinth terms this is aggressive subtraction of verbs — but it also cuts the verb Cyan never used to cut: observe, cross-reference, synthesize. Where The Witness made noticing the verb, Firmament keeps only manipulation. And several reviewers note the tool upgrades are 'never used in tandem' — a combinatorial promise the learning curve never detonates. With no combinatorial space behind the fewer verbs, its subtraction left friction rather than depth. That, I'd argue, is why one camp calls the simplicity elegant and the other calls it dull.
Firmament — Steam achievement icon 'Robot Rodeo'
The Feel of the Story
On story, the negative side is nearly unanimous. You're a 'Keeper,' guided through the realms by a French-accented, ghost-like mentor. Capitalized terms — 'Threshold,' 'The Embrace' — drift by unexplained, and the actual plot is dumped into a late monologue. Reviewers even agree on specifics: 'engagement is zero after the first five minutes'; 'there are two readable books, and the same two are scattered everywhere.'
Tellingly, the positives don't deny the thinness. They accept it as 'sparse but interesting' and volunteer their imagination to fill the gaps. Given that Cyan's signature is the book — that Myst and Riven buried whole worlds in journals and inscriptions — 'almost nothing to read' lands as a real loss for veterans. One reviewer jokes that the studio 'won an award for a two-book library.'
I read this less as good-or-bad writing than as the inevitable downstream of a lowered observation resolution. Once you decide not to seed the world with clues, the story can't rise from the world either; it has to be bolted on as narration. Trimming the puzzle verb quietly thinned the storytelling circuit too — coherent as design, and paradoxical in that the coherence cut away Cyan's own strength.
Firmament — Steam store key art
Place in the Lineage
Almost no reviewer describes this game on its own; Cyan's own lineage — Myst, Riven, Obduction — is always the yardstick. The most common shorthand is 'diet Myst.' Positives use it kindly ('we have plenty of Myst; this is a new middle ground'); negatives use it as a barb ('I'd have accepted this in 1992, as a precursor to Myst').
Under the split sits VR. As the thoughtful positive review argues, building around the Adjunct is a 'VR-first' choice that dictated everything downstream — no note-taking, no world-embedded clues, all rational for a player in a headset. The negative side reads it as 'a VR tech demo with a story bolted on,' bundling it with the absence of Robyn Miller's sound and distrust of the studio-acknowledged AI-generated assets.
I'd rather place it than rank it. If The Witness made observation the verb and Obduction made world-synthesis the verb, Firmament makes only 'manipulation in space' the verb — a pivot within Cyan's lineage from knowledge-synthesis to bodily operation. Veterans stumbled because the genre's center of gravity shifted under their feet. That the developer replied to individual reviews and kept patching suggests the pivot was intent, not accident.
Firmament — Steam store key art
Sources
This article is written from the Steam user reviews as of 2026-07-24 — a reading of the reviews, not a playthrough.
・Steam: Firmament (Mostly Positive; 72% of 881 Steam-purchaser reviews positive / 1,159 positive and 452 negative across all 1,611; snapshot 2026-07-24)
・Read ~20 English reviews sorted by Helpful, positive and negative, spanning May 2023 to March 2025. The top of that list skews negative, and most of those pans come from Kickstarter backers and longtime Cyan fans.
・Cross-checked against PC Gamer (Dominic Tarason) and Metacritic.
Closing
To sum up: Mostly Positive, 72% of Steam purchasers (snapshot 2026-07-24). That the most-read reviews lean negative says this isn't 'a solid game for everyone' but 'a game people sort sharply for and against.' Cited playtimes scatter from roughly 5 to 13 hours, past 20 for completionists.
Let me note honestly the flaw both camps share: bugs reported since launch — cranes, ice and elevators that freeze, catching on a railing and falling — bad enough that even positive reviews add 'wait for a patch,' and the studio shipped a 'drop back to your last save on a bug' option. From a design standpoint I give it 6.5, a notch below the 72%, because the Adjunct-first subtraction of verbs trimmed not just the puzzles but the world's observation resolution and the story's circuitry.
I still won't call it a failure. Anyone who wants to walk a meditative, deathless first-person world with no notes and no ciphers — especially newcomers to the Myst lineage — is well served. Those who live for the 'observe and synthesize' pleasure of Riven or Obduction will feel the ground shift underfoot. When praise and blame point at one spot, an author's choice sits underneath: Firmament let go of Cyan's book and its observation to bet on VR-era bodily operation. Enter knowing that range, and it's a beautiful, lonely thing.
Firmament — Steam achievement icon 'Juleston's Soaring Tower'
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