A taste of life on the steppe, and not much else (★★☆☆☆)
You are alone in a yurt in the middle of the Mongolian steppe with no companion other than a broken android chick with a flower vase for a lower body. Cradle sure is an intriguing elevator pitch! It’s a shame the actual experience is short and yet somehow still feels padded and just doesn’t sustain this initial sense of mystery.
But let’s talk about the yurt first. It has one of the greatest sense of place I’ve seen in a videogame. It’s rickety thing worthy of the Middle Ages, but it holds a contemporary TV/DVD player, an early 20th century kitchen and futuristic doodads including the aforementioned android. It’s also credible as a lived-in place: filled with family photos and documents to read, a Buddhist shrine, children’s toys, etc. It’s worth it tearing the place top to bottom to see what mysteries it has to reveal and it has quite a few.
Stepping out of the yurt for the first time is equally impressive. Hills lazily stretch over the horizon. A lone line of elevated hover train pylons leaves to the imagination the outside world it connects to. The enormousness and remoteness of the steppe are well represented, but there is almost nothing to interact with out there, as can be expected. The only other place to explore is a derelict amusement park. The puzzles in Cradle should be mostly familiar to anyone who has played first person point-and-click adventure games. The park, however, adds a virtual reality Minecraft cube-digging minigame, as improbable and inopportune as that may sound. The game even tries to find a good reason why there would be block puzzles in the middle of the steppe. The explanation is about twice as implausible as the reason why Quiet has to run around half naked in Metal Gear Solid V.
The story itself is just weird. I’ve wondered what kind of conversation some dude in the steppe would have with a robot chick. It turns out the answer is “a lot of dry exposition”. Cradle’s approach to sci-fi is to assault the player with a shotgun blast of gobbledygook. I won’t spoil it here, but I find it’s a lot of concepts crammed in a 4-5 hour game, culminating in an abrupt and quite odd ending. Some of it is compelling, but I have to admit it mostly didn’t do it for me.
I didn’t terribly like Cradle, but I admire its ramshackle originality. It’s something that somehow it seems only Eastern Europe can produce (Pathologic and Stalker come to mind). Unlike many indies custom-made to cater to hipster sensibilities, Cradle has a real sense of authorship.
Idle Thoughts 