In brief: Developer Cyan is best known as the creator of the iconic 1993 PC title Myst – the best-selling PC game ever until 2002. Its new game, Firmament, which arrives on May 18, looks like an updated version of the classic pre-rendered adventure, except this one recommends 32GB of RAM.

Steampunky adventure Firmament is another first-person puzzler from Cyan. It looks and sounds a lot like a modern Myst, but one of the differences is that it can be played in both regular 2D and in VR.

Firmament managed to pass its $1.285 million Kickstarter goal in 2019 by almost $200,000, illustrating the excitement around the game. It missed its July 2020 release date, but the new launch is only a few weeks away.

As noted by PC Gamer, the minimum and recommended specs for Firmament have been raising some eyebrows. The former set is pretty forgiving: an AMD Ryzen 7 2700X Eight-Core Processor (16 CPUs) ~3.7GHz or Intel i5 7000 series, Radeon RX 5700XT or Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 8GB, and 16GB of RAM.

But the recommended specs are a bit more demanding than what most games usually ask for, and they have one thing a lot of users are unlikely to possess. In addition to an AMD Ryzen 7 3800X 8-Core Processor (16 CPUs) ~3.9GHz/Intel i5 11000 series and an AMD Radeon RX 6800XT/Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti 12GB, a massive 32GB of RAM is recommended.

According to the latest Steam survey, 32GB is the second-most-popular amount of RAM in participants' computers, but it's still something that just 22.4% of people possess. The most popular amount is 16GB, found in 56% of participants' PCs.

But in addition to modern games asking for more powerful graphics cards, RAM recommendations are also increasing. Titles like Returnal and The Last of Us Part 1 benefit from 32GB, and we can expect more games to follow suit.

With Firmament, however, Cyan has good reason to recommend 32GB. It told PC Gamer that is was a visually demanding game, especially in VR mode, and the company wanted to "make sure that folks know going in what specs we recommend to enable them to play the game at higher settings by default (and at a high framerate) at higher resolutions or in VR."

Cyan added that the game will look and perform fine on a machine with 16GB, noting that Firmament can even be played on M1 MacBook Airs with 8GB. "But knowing how our fans usually have high expectations for what their machines are capable of, we wanted to set the mark for a guaranteed visually good and fast-loading experience on Windows, especially considering the number of configuration options out there for the platform and our need to support folks who want to play in VR as well," the company explained.

Firmament will be launching on PC via Steam and GOG on May 18. For those who want to play in VR, it supports the Valve Index, HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, Rift S, and Quest 2.