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With its latest quiet science-fiction mystery, Cyan Worlds asks us to appreciate the value of the manual labourer. The inventors and engineers of civilisation’s great machines take a back seat here, lest we forget that the people who keep them running are no mere human resources. It’s a point underlined by the setting – otherworldly on one hand, pervaded with 19th-century industry on the other, that period marked by technological upheaval, and fuelled by mass exploitation. Firmament’s puzzles are appropriately large and mechanical, testing to see if you have what it takes to do a machinist’s job. Although, be warned: what it takes is not only intelligence and precision, but a healthy reserve of patience.

The exact job in question here is that of a Keeper, apparently the last of your kind, awakened from hypersleep into the Firmament Project, a world comprising three remote biomes that orbit a residential hub. This trio of mini-worlds together enable the reproduction of life. Frozen Curievale contains an ice factory for delivering fresh water, Juleston has supplies of sulphur used to run a power station, and St Andrew houses an enormous conservatory where vegetation grows. When Keepers were numerous, their role was to maintain the system, but now you’re asked to do something else – raise three mechanical spires to begin a process known as the Embrace.