Firmament (2023)

Early reviews were critical of bugs and crashes when this launched a couple weeks ago. I ran into a couple crashes myself the day after launch but they quickly released patches and I suspect those quality issues are mostly resolved, as I was able to play entirely crash and bug free for the last 10 days or so.

So with quality issues set aside, I really enjoyed this game. I backed it during the initial Kickstarter campaign, so I waited the full 4+ years. I have to say I'm a bit surprised in how little content there is given the timeline. But given how small of a team this is, and how different from the initial teaser the final game is, I suspect they iterated and tweaked a lot, as well as tried to break ground on really making this a VR-first style game. I actually didn't even play this in VR, so I can't comment on that. Coming at this as an original backer, the smallness of the game is a bit of a disappointment. If you're just learning about this game, it probably won't be an issue for you at the right price.

So, putting quality AND length concerns aside, this really felt like a cyan game, and I loved that aspect of it. Big beautiful worlds. Environment sized puzzles that force you learn through tinkering and feel rewarding when finished. Of course, there are the occasional frustrations that are stupidly resolved when you realize you just didn't see something the first 100 times you passed it, but the VR centric nature of this game actually helps make interaction points much harder to miss.

The puzzles themselves are less frustrating than other cyan games I've played, but still fun and challenging, with lots of "ah ha!" moments. Most of them actually look harder than they are, the solutions ultimately end up being fairly simple.

The story was... an afterthought. And really just an excuse to build a cool game, so I appreciate it for that. But otherwise, don't expect much from the story.

Graphics and environments are beautiful. They look like sort of an oil painting. This filter results in a kind of strange but beautiful artifacting when you're moving or looking around sometimes, and otherwise works really well.

I really wish more games like this would come out, as it's really fun and relaxing to explore an environment and not have to worry about shooting or dying. Unfortunately, it's a one-and-done kind of thing, no real replayability.

If you've enjoyed Myst or similar games in the past, check this one out.