#cyan worlds

[shoomlah]

sometimes the spirit compels you to make a 90's vaporwave fever dream tribute to Myst, and you must listen 📕📘

#myst #sirrus #achenar #Mysterium #Mysterium con #Mysterium 2023 #1990s #vaporwave #rand miller #robyn miller #cyan worlds #cyan inc #had to reference to most important bit of niche Cyan lore: the 1995 Gap Khakis Ad

[never-obsolete]

Riven: The Sequel to Myst (PC, 1997)

#1997 #90s #cyan worlds #myst #riven #pc games #video games #1k

[veovis-of-kveer]

At Mysterium!!!

#myst #d'ni #mysterium #fan stuff #merch #riven #exile #uru #cyan worlds #cyan

[raideo]

I couldn't find this literally anywhere on tumblr so I guess I'm taking up the mantle of bringing the Hype for this game here. This game got funded on kickstarter 4-ish years ago and then covid hit and it was delayed way past when they thought the ship date was gonna be, but I am so glad Cyan Worlds took the extra time and care to make this dang thing look as good as it does! Yes! This is the same small indie studio that made MYST way way way back in 1993! They're still around, and I have been a fan of their work since I was a little squirt (oof, maybe I'm showing my age... 😬). But oh my gosh, all the publicity stuff I have seen for Firmament so far just proves that they have only grown with the modern tech and tools to make bigger and cooler shit.

#Also like not to brag or reveal my pledge amount but ya boi might be having his name in the credits B) #videos #cyan worlds inc #cyan worlds #firmament game #firmament #cyan firmament #Youtube #myst

[meowthiroth]

MY BOY!!!!!!

#SO HAPPY TO SEE MY SON AGAIN #i cant believe my quab plush got first dibs on a spot 😭💖 #i love that jeff even remembered the stupid nickname i gave him fkskfkfkf #myst #quab #cyan worlds #plushmaking #my art

[gameboydemakes]

Quite a few folks commented about the Myst demake looking like Cyan's earlier works so...Myst in 1bit!

If you liked this, please visit my Patreon. Any amount thrown my way helps and is greatly appreciated! Thanks!

[Patreon] [Twitter] [Instagram] [Kofi]

#pixel #art #pixel art #Myst #1bit #cyan worlds #nintendo #gameboy

[magpies-gold]

Back From Mysterium

I did a very small couple of posts before this, but Saturday at Mysterium blew my expectations out of the water, and so I decided I needed to circle back around and try again as a much bigger post.

First, foremost, and coolest - yes! I got to meet Rand Miller (bonus infamous RAWA just to the left as well)! Even better, for once in my life my social anxiety didn't turn me into a non-verbal lump and I was able to say a grand total of two full sentences and a greeting. If you know me at all, then you know that that's quite the accomplishment. Usually @timmcosplay has to do the talking for me when I inevitably choke on my own tongue, but by a quirk of fate we got separated (he wanted to get our Book of Ti'ana signed and got yoinked into a different line up from me, who wanted photo evidence) and I had no choice but to attempt to be a functional human. My theory is that I've talked to Rand's face so many times during the intro to Riven (I always talk back) that it was just second nature to say hello the second he looked at me. Genuinely, though, he's so kind and so patient and I'm stoked that he made time to meet all of us and then spend a couple hours even after that being a presenter and answering heaps of questions.

Tim may have not been with me directly, but he was still creeping in the sidelines getting photos of me getting photo'd and briefly chatting. ;)

Ultimately, we were split into three groups and everyone ran through the events of the day in a different order.

Tim and I were on Team Ytram (or Team Forg as I insisted on calling it) and had little Rivenese froggos on our badges.

After the meet and greet, we got lunch. It was simplistic fare, but the fact that we got hot dogs and Cool Ranch Doritos out back of the Cyan HQ means that they were very special hot dogs and Cool Ranch Doritos. Legendary!

And then... they actually allowed my wee goblin self and Tim to go through the iconic archway entrance and to scramble around their actual studio. I've seen pictures of the place on the internet before and knew how neat it would be to some degree, but now I know where everything is!

In no particular order....

Iconic signage and that giant honkin' Moiety dagger that Adam Savage apparently worked on?? It is truly large in person!

Costumes from Riven! Including Catherine's dress, which I remember my mom was always cooing over when I was playing the game on my clonky PC in the late 90's, and Gehn's costume, with Tim posing (and having not totally slightly held up the rest of the group by getting detail shots for cosplay purposes, no, no, he wouldn't do that....)

Art! Design sketches and THE MAP.

The infamous elevator wherein you'd better know your D'ni numbers if you want to get anywhere (I would get stuck).

And then... artifacts!

They had THE LEVER from the beginning of Riven. Did it never occur to me that the lever was a real lever? THE LEVER IS A REAL LEVER.

Plus there were goggles and books and Gehn's gun (AKA the only Game Over inducing object in Riven) and more character design sketches with actual costume fabric swatches! That last bit made Tim make high pitched glee noises, as someone who both designs and makes costumes himself.

There were presentations after all of that. Trailers, talks, a non-profit project to digitize over a hundred hours of behind the scenes footage from the making of Uru and Riven and other things, which we got a sneak peek of. They showed off a snippet of the remake of Riven. There was just so much. It was hours and hours and I was practically vi-bra-ting by the time we finally were ushered back to the bus and back to Spokane.

I will never entirely get over the fact that I was able to go see all that with my own two eyeballs. As someone who's been enamoured with the universe surrounding Myst island for the full 30 years of its existence, ever since I was 8 years old, who used to make big calligraphy posters of passages from The Book of Atrus and The Book of Ti'ana and tape them up all over Thorhild Central School whether my fellow students and teachers wanted me to or not, and who was so solidly influenced by the idea of books as literal doors to other worlds that it became a foundation for how I view my own characters and stories (namely that I'm no god, and they do have a life all their own), this is a treasured memory.

#mysterium #mysterium 2023 #myst #riven #cyan worlds #rand miller

[sacred-gayze]

This is game is nuts

#Firmament #cyan worlds #gaming #20s #unreal #adventure #puzzle #sci fi #myst

[thursdayisbetterthanfriday]

It’s finally here!

#firmament #cyan #cyan worlds #myst #riven #obduction #so hyped #i need more #puzzle games

[toyoll]

[Click for better quality]

MYST

A humble tribute to one of my favorite games of all time. The perspective is...well..horrid, but I did my best to capture all my love for the very first in a long string of games that have fascinated and inspired me since I was six.

It was a perfect excuse to break out my sepia pens too!

#toyoll #art #myst #myst game #myst island #real myst #riven #atrus #sirrus #achenar #cyan worlds #game #retro gaming #puzzle game #d'ni #linking book #traditional art #inks #ink #fantasy #ink pen

[kelticangel]

what’s your favorite thing you’ve watched/read/played recently?

Oooooh!! 💜

I just finished a playthrough of the game Obduction and it was so incredibly satisfying!!! Playlist is up on my channel if you're curious enough to want to watch me fumble through nearly 30 hrs of gameplay 😅

I'm such a very big fan of the games produced by Cyan Worlds, and this one really did not disappoint. They have so much More depth to their world building, which makes all the puzzle adventure part of it so much more realistic. I get to be an ethnographer each time I find a new one to play

#cyan worlds #obduction #myst #90s girl gamer

[never-obsolete]

Riven: The Sequel to Myst (PC, 1997)

#1997 #90s #cyan worlds #myst #riven #pc games #video games #1k

[veovis-of-kveer]

Mysterium 2023: Rand and Richard Vander Wende (!) reveal Gahrohevtee.

More pics below:

#myst #d'ni #riven #uru #mysterium #mysterium2023 #cyan worlds #cyan inc #cyan #gaming #fantasy

[dying-suffering-french-stalkers]

logo for when you are a fan of both cyan games and the criterion collection

#this post brought to you by me making the same stupid joke every time i load a myst game #myst #riven #cyan worlds #the criterion collection #my edits

[gotogames]

#obduction #cyan worlds

[zaftikat]

Game Review: Firmament

EDIT 2023-06-08: I have been informed that developers used so called AI tools to assist with asset and story development. Needless to say this makes my review moot. You should not give money to Cyan for Firmament if you haven't already.

There is something of a pit in my stomach when I think about my gameplay experience with Firmament. Deep in that pit, in a modest Dutch Colonial fixer-upper, lives the potential for this game. The setting has so much more story to tell than we were given. It lives in that Myst-like space where we enter a world at its nadir. Violent collapse has occurred, but we hold a glimmer of hope for what comes next. That is not an unfamiliar formula for fans of Cyan. Is our Virgil trustworthy, or is she leading us to damnation? Who are we when the game tells us that deep sleep erases memory? We’re told that we are the next and possibly last of the many Keepers. A collective whose goal is the preservation of a cooperative order that will create a livable world for the Arrivers. Our Mentor gives us a mission—activate a series of towers, and prepare the worlds for the Embrace. In order to do so we must complete a series of traversal puzzles with our handy dandy Adjunct—a device clearly designed for VR compatibility at the cost of the expected Cyan gameplay experience. Pausing for a moment to lift ourselves to the meta-context of this game, Cyan pitched backers on the notion of what I’m calling VR-first design when they reached out for crowdfunding in early 2019. I think that context is necessary to understanding the game, so let’s talk about it after the cut.

When the game first entered crowdfunding, I had come fresh off of a re-play of Obduction. Obduction is a game that by all accounts is a triumph of Cyan design aesthetics, and when I saw the project page for Firmament, I was ready to dive in right then and there. Games have development cycles, so I knew I would be waiting. Then 2020 happened. The project, by necessity, had to be scaled back from the early tech demos. A decision was made to redouble the focus on the Adjunct tool. It would now interact almost exclusively with nodes. This meant paring down puzzles that did not interact with the core mechanic. Cyan did not shy away from the fact that the game was going to be scaled back, and even spoke of it as a function of approachability. We know all this because they, throughout the development cycle sent numerous detailed backer updates. For all I may detract from the final product, I must equally praise the communication from Cyan. As a designer, I know games take time. Coding shaders, composing dynamic music, writing scripts, creating environments, there is so much that goes into creating a video game and Cyan kept their supporters in the loop on every part of the process. Nevertheless, it is abundantly clear the game was scaled back. I finished the game in 8, with at least an hour of that time tabbed out to work on personal projects.

The gameplay, with its VR-first design, leaves so much to be desired. Instead of the interactivity we’ve come to expect from Cyan games—with even mundane objects being game entities—we instead have a far more empty world, where every puzzle is solved by the Adjunct. In late Curievale, there is a puzzle wherein you ride an elevator up and down, then connect 4 nodes after running back across the zone in order to then run across the zone again to get to the next puzzle. The tedium of trying to finesse the nodes so that your fully upgraded adjunct will do its job is an essential mechanic to the game’s limited longevity. In the subsequent Curievale puzzle, there’s a section where the game expects you to fire a node through a miniscule gap in some ice. The puzzle isn’t about how you engage with the elements of the problem, but about how you can master ways around the physics engine. A game that uses janky controls as a difficulty gate is effectively trying to frustrate you into a longer gameplay experience. And that refrain repeated a few times while I traversed the three still visually stunning worlds.

A few months before I write this, Clayton Ashley of Polygon put out a video wherein he praises the pseudo-genre of note-taking games, and indeed does highlight their heyday by citing entries from Cyan’s game library. It bears repeating here, Firmament was designed as a VR-first game. Nothing breaks immersion in VR quite like needing to take off your headset to write things down on paper. And this fact is the truest tragedy of Firmament’s gameplay. I think fondly of getting to break out a notebook to teach myself the grid system of base 4 numbers used by the Villein in Obduction. Here, gone is the simple joy of having to learn to solve puzzles. Learning, finding secrets, and sniffing out details of the world are one of the key drivers of exploration in a puzzle game. Without that element, the worlds, despite their gorgeous and massive scale, feel lifeless. Not in the way a game like the Witness feels both lifeless and lived-in, but rather one that feels devoid of any interest. Like the world has been sanitized after everyone disappeared. It’s an empty platform on a disused subway line that has been assiduously scrubbed of any evidence of life or use. We get some bits and pieces of story, intentionally obscured by our Mentor and her agenda. Most of what we learn is told to us as a series of cryptic Proper Nouns. We don’t get a look at why until the game has been completed, twist largely untelegraphed. Myst and Obduction have bad endings that you might reach if you’re not carefully exploring and studying clues. Firmament is far too linear for that. There’s a cavernous echo where those human story elements would be in other Cyan games, and worst of all they skipped out on the FMV, an essential part of the Cyan charm. 

So that I’m not just endlessly ripping on this game, let’s talk about what it does well. The aesthetic design and practicality of the setting is fascinating and beautiful. They have made gorgeous use of Art Deco style to produce a world that feels narratively coherent, nostalgic and futuristic all at once. The Arches combine that styling with a sci-fi megastructure to create that cohesive and stunning visual language. The Adjunct provides clear direction in puzzle solving by making obvious the possible interactions, though this is somewhat of a trade-off when puzzles become jank fights. The game leaves me wishing and wanting to know so much more about the setting, and that is the mark of compelling world design. There are also some truly fun puzzles like the greenhouse platform puzzle that call to mind that very Myst-like feeling of nostalgia. Each of those elements still feels insufficient to make this game what I had hoped it would be. I so desperately wanted to love this game, as badly as the soft-boy kindness influencer wants to be bi for clout. But like the milquetoast wishes-he-wasn’t-straight man, I just can't bring myself to swallow the nut this game offers. 

#Firmament #cyan worlds #puzzle games #game review #writing on tumblr