Firmament will be out in May, and you'll want a pretty beefy PC to play it.
Firmament, the new game from Myst developer Cyan, will be out on May 18, and it will probably not surprise you to hear that, going by the new trailer, it will be a lot like Myst.
It sounds like Myst, too. Firmament is a “puzzle-adventure game” that takes place in three unique and seemingly abandoned worlds, each one filled with bizarre, incredible machines that serve no apparent purpose. Your reason for being there is unknown, but figuring out how the world works will ultimately uncover your role in it.
And unlike previous Cyan games, you won’t undertake your quest alone in this one. You’ll be accompanied on your adventure by a silent “clockwork companion” called the Adjunct, who will help you solve puzzles through a vocabulary of hand gestures that will grow over the course of the game, as well as “a mysterious apparition with a story of her own.”
It’s obviously very Myst-like but really, I wouldn’t have it any other way. Myst is divisive, and as we said in our review of the 2021 remake, it’s also very old. But Cyan is uniquely good at making these sorts of sprawling, deeply strange and lonely worlds, and I’m eager to see what it comes up with next. Maybe it’ll be another straight-up Myst-alike, but the studio promises it will deliver “deep storytelling and rich world-building,” which some people would probably argue hasn’t been a hallmark of Cyan’s games for the past 20 years or so. (I still haven’t made up my mind about Uru.)
I take comfort knowing that I’m not the only one who wants to see more of this kind of thing from Cyan: Its development was enabled by a successful $1.4 million Kickstarter campaign that ran in 2019. (The expected July 2020 release was a major miss, but as I said when the campaign was announced, that’s how it usually goes with Kickstarters anyway.)
The one thing about Firmament that baffles me are the minimum system requirements, particularly the recommended spec. Here they are:
Minimum:
OS: Windows 10Processor: AMD Ryzen 7 2700X Eight-Core Processor (16 CPUs), ~3.7GHz; Intel i5 7000 seriesMemory: 16 GB RAMGraphics: AMD Radeon RX 5700XT; NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 8GBDirectX: Version 11Storage: 20 GB available spaceSound Card: N/AVR Support: SteamVR – Rift, Rift S, Quest 2 via Link, HTC Vive, Vive Pro, Index
Recommended:
OS: Windows 10Processor: AMD Ryzen 7 3800X 8-Core Processor (16 CPUs), ~3.9GHz; Intel i5 11000 seriesMemory: 32 GB RAMGraphics: AMD Radeon RX 6800XT; NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti 12GBDirectX: Version 12Storage: 20 GB available spaceSound Card: N/AVR Support: SteamVR – Rift, Rift S, Quest 2 via Link, HTC Vive, Vive Pro, Index
A Ryzen 7 3800X or Core i5 11000 CPU is stiff, but 32GB of RAM is the real eyebrow-raiser here. That seems like an awful lot for a Myst-style adventure game, even one developed for VR. The Myst remake recommends 16GB, which is pretty wild for a game that required 4MB in its original incarnation, so clearly there’s more going on in these newer releases than just prettier pictures. But a Cyan game recommending 32GB is just weird.
Firmament was originally announced as a VR title, by the way, but will be available as a standard PC release as well. It’s available for wishlisting now on Steam.
(Image credit: Cyan)
(Image credit: Cyan)
(Image credit: Cyan)
(Image credit: Cyan)
(Image credit: Cyan)
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