Blog - David Helkowski
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Firmament game is slop

I've played through and completed all of the Myst series by Cyan Worlds except for URU. I've also played many similar games over the years. I enjoyed many of those games greatly. I have fond memories of playing them over the years. I can remember many details within the games even now.

Several years ago I bought the game "Firmament", and I never got around to playing it because I've been busy. Two days ago I decided to play it. I've played it for a few hours so far and obtained all three "upgrades." I have not yet completed the game. I will, but I'm much less than motivated to continue.

As you can see by the title of this blog post I don't think fondly of the game.

If I'm going to call it slop I would like to explain both what I mean precisely and why I think that's a fair thing to say about the game.

I use the word slop because I've been thinking a fair amount about "AI slop" and it seems to me that the game is very similar despite that I'm not aware of AI being used to make it. I should look into that. Maybe AI was used and it is both "slop" and "AI slop."

The game is pretty. The graphics are shiny and smooth. There are a fair amount of nice looking details strewn everywhere in the game that... have no purpose. The Myst series also has this. There are many random objects strewn about, but in Myst many of those objects can be interacted with. Most of those interactions in Myst were just decorative. You click a thing. It rotates or spins around, but nothing much else happens.

That was a fun part of the Myst games. The world felt alive and interactive instead of just being a bunch of 3d model props litered about.

Firmament seems to have decided that's too much effort, so it skipped making almost all objects interactive. There are the same sorts of things sitting about as in Myst games, but you can interact with almost none of them.

Things I've noticed and thought to interact with in Firmament that you can't:

This is common in many 3d games, but it is sad ( and pathetic ) to see Cyan Worlds swing this direction into useless 3d prop land. It makes the game worse but isn't my core complaint about the game.

My core complaint is the way the ( very few ) puzzles within the game are implemented. Remember how in the Myst games there will be a contraption with doo-dads you click on or shift around? And how there were dozens of those things throughout the game? Yeah there's none of that in Firmament.

Instead they took a handful of those puzzles and scaled them up to world size where you have to interact with huge objects and become part of the puzzle. This is not a good thing. To do that they made the puzzles pathetically easy. They are only difficult in that it is a little confusing to notice that it is an easy puzzle scaled up.

I'm thinking of 3 specific puzzles in the game here.

The first is the floating electric battery puzzle. I hate the puzzle so much. It's an easy puzzle but the way it is implemented is just so horrible. It has text indicators you need to make a circuit, so it's obvious enough you have to rotate the platforms to gain the correct voltage. So I knew immediately each platform is worth so many volts and they need to be connected.

What's not obvious though is whether the puzzle is working, because the only indicator of that is that the voltage of the circuit is shown when you "connect with" one of the platforms and a full circuit is present. That's sloppy as all hell.

As a standalone puzzle on a stand in Myst? Would have been fine and easy enough and not irritating. As a world scale puzzle? It's utter shit.

The second is the "2d vertical hanging plant moving platform puzzle". It's a 2d shifting / connecting block puzzle scaled to world size and required the acting element ( you the player ) to navigate around in the puzzle. It's just a slog. I understood it for what it is easily but doing it was only yucky. It was easy enough, it was just a drag to do.

The third is the "ice block crane on rails puzzle". It is, once again, a 2d puzzle that could be displayed on a board scaled up to world size and requiring you to move around within it to move the bits. Basically just move the fucking crane on the rail left/right and lift and lower the crane bit with the ice block attached to navigate through. This is bad because it isn't natural in the environment. The whole world of the level is clearly arranged just to make the 3d world behave like a crappy 2d puzzle.

These 3 puzzle that would be 3 small boards in a Myst game and each take maybe 5-10 minutes each? They are half of the Firmament game and effectively take nearly 2 hours to do these 3 things.

So far that's two major problems. The first being useless 3d prop land. The second easy 2d puzzles scaled to tedious world size. There's more.

The core mechanic of the game is this contraption that looks like that stole the idea of "arm mounted shit" from Portal and adapted it into "mechanic for pressing buttons". That's what the fucking thing does. It lets you interact with machines that have buttons. So instead of nice buttons or levers on machines you can interact with? There's a fucking hand wavy "electric arc through the air" from the fucking "arm mounted shit" that... let's you press theoretical buttons and move theoretical switches that the devs were too fucking lazy to make exist and operate in the game world.

Imagine the game gave you a touchscreen infrared remote and hailed that as a spiritual aspect of the game. That would be better. Or perhaps it should look like a garage door opener. It only needs 8 buttons at most that I've seen to far in game. 4 sets of two increase/decrease. You already freaking interact with the thing by pressing keys that are shown on screen. Placing those keys on a remote control? Exactly the same and exactly as lazy and horrible.

Hell if it was some cheapass infrared remote you pick up off a dusty table and have to hunt for the batteries for it and eventually replace the IR emitter when it burns out? I'd respect it more.

Can it get worse? It can get worse. You know how in the Myst games there are hidden hints and diagrams and stuff you need to know in the books for the puzzles? In Firmamet, nah, fuck that. You don't need to look at any of the books in game. In fact of the first 10 books you encounter, 4 of them are the exact same fucking book and content. The books are utterly meaningless. The rotten moldy cherry on top? Cyan admitted book content was created using AI.

Let's discuss another mechanic. In Myst you have linking books. I like linking books. They are pretty fast, not terribly annoying, and they get me from point A to point B. They are so great as a mechanic thinks like MystCraft exist and are excellent. MystCraft is so awesome compared to Firmament. The way you just right click machines to get an interface to them in IndustrialCraft? Also awesome compared to the garage opener mangled arm bullshit. But back to the crappy Firmament mechanism.

Firmament decided to reinvent the Myst lore wheel by replacing linking books with tedious warp machines, where you have to wait tediously to open the damned thing with the arm mounted garage remote, then repeat the same bullshit to select a destination.

This whole pile of bullshit? Could literally be a fucking in game pedestal with a linking book that takes 10x less time and is 20x less annoying.

This damned warp machine garbage is so bad I can barely see through the annoyance haze clouding my mind to explain more about why this game sucks so much. I will struggle onward in my attempt to explain in painful detail why you should Firmly reject Firmament.

So let me think. Hmm. I turn the game on and... oh crap. It already sucks from the first moment.

The UI/UX of the game menus is... terrible. You know how in Myst the game starts to looking at a book, and you click the linking book image, and you are in the game? Nice right? Firmament? It drops you into a damned menu that looks like it was created by a junior engineer who knows nothing about UX.

What do you generally want to do when you play a game like this? You want to play the game and just close it and reopen it and be wherever you were at, right?

Well how does that work in this game? Damned if I can tell. There are save slots, but also a "auto save". Only auto save also functions as current save. So if you load from a saved slot, you get informed that it will overwrite your saved slot, even if you literally fucking clicked save game into a slot and then exited the game 10 seconds later. Why? Because the dumbass game auto saves when you exit the game, and it of course sloppily thinks "oh! are you sure you want to overwrite loading your 10 second before game?"

Confused yet? Yeah it's shit. My explanation makes no sense because the way the game works makes no sense.

Continuing on. Since it dumped me into menus on load I remember digging around in the menus to see what was there. There was something odd there but I've forgotten this moment. I'll have to revise this after looking in the game again.

Ah I now remember. Where I currently stopped playing. After gaining all three upgrades to the arm mounted remote control magic slop, I then went and activated the giant metal spider mech. Yes. There is a metal spider mech in the game. Are you reminded yet of the trash that was Wild Wild West? That movie was crappy. But it was gloriously crappy. Firmament metal spider mech? Just plain crappy.

Instead of having a arm crap remote with left/right, forward/backward, and up/down, they decided to split the controls between two different nodes instead. One with left/right and forward/backward, and the other with up/down. Because... to make it more annoying I guess? To make it so you can see the up/down node thingy through the hole in the floor for a further puzzle perhaps?

So I tried to do that further puzzle, which involves "docking" the fucking spider mech. Yeah. We have a fucking spider mech. Might as well add "docking" to the mix.

The spider mech does have a big round port in the bottom that you lower onto matching circular receptacles.

Hmm.

Well anyways. Back to why the spider mech sucks. It sucks because it's implementation is terrible. Think 90s mechwarrior but worse, because it clips through world geometry. When that happens? World geometry interferes then with what you can do, and additionally with push you right through the wall of spider mech so you fall through space and land on the ground outside of the gameplay area you are supposed to be able to reach.

What do you do then? Well you have to go online and ask people "I fell out of the (whatever) how the fuck do I continue the game now?" The answer? There is an option in the game menus to "Teleport to a safe location", because, well, of course there needs to be because the game is so sloppy and bug ridden that it is needed.

With that I come to a close. Fucking spider mech docking followed by transdimensional wall-shoving satisfied.