Cradle is a first-person adventure game from Flying Cafe for Semianimals. Yes, that is their name.
In Cradle players awaken in a state of amnesia, in a yurt somewhere in Mongolia. It’s the near-future, I believe the game said it was nearing 2080, and your yurt is filled with antique equipment…and a cyborg lady. The entire game takes place in the yurt, the few acres surrounding the yurt, and in a nearby abandoned theme park.
The game is short enough to where you could easily complete it in one sitting, though if you’re adverse to slow-paced exploration and vague instructions, Cradle doesn’t have much to offer to you and I predict your playtime will be much less.
In fact, about halfway through the game I was already bored. The story wasn’t giving me anything interesting, the protagonist’s voice acting was monotone like he was narrating an audio book, and I just didn’t care about the story or the characters involved. Unlike the recently reviewed Submerged, where players were given something to work towards immediately (taking care of the little brother), Cradle was content with scattering around a bunch of flyers on the floor and hoping that would be interesting enough to propel my interests in the game further.
It wasn’t.
But, I know some players really dig playing sci-fi Sherlock Holmes, and for them I will say that Cradle does give you an impressive amount of back-story through environmental props and such. But you’ll have to spend a lot of time searching around for them all. Time that I just wasn’t interested in putting into Cradle.
What really rubbed me the wrong way were the puzzle platforming segments that contrasted much too sharply with the rest of the game’s tone. To go from slowly walking around a yurt and feeding a hawk, to jumping around on bright yellow cubes, in a Tron-like digital game, was very strange. The shift in gameplay didn’t help Cradle out much at all because I’m not a fan of puzzle platformers (like Portal) to begin with. So being required to partake in these mini-games (you’ll play the mini-game 4 times by the end of Cradle) just further agitated my boredom.
The other puzzles in Cradle, which largely involved finding an object and putting it into another object, were decent at best.
One of the first things you do in the game is cook breakfast for your hawk. One of the steps involved going out and getting some fruit. The fruit is high up in a tree, so naturally I look for a ladder. No ladders are available, but while I’m looking I find a small hatchet that I could easily use to cut down one of the trees. Turns out I can’t even pick up the hatchet, even though it’s laying right there on the shelf by the door.
I grew frustrated that maybe I was missing something completely obvious, so I went and pulled up a guide for Cradle (credit to a clever machine on Steam for the guide). It turns out that I needed to go and find a stick and use a stick to throw it at the fruit, to knock them down. That doesn’t seem very intuitive to me.
It was little vague objectives like that that really wore down my patience while playing Cradle.
Overall, if you dig slow-paced, sci-fi adventure games and don’t mind some puzzle platforming mixed in, then give Cradle a try. To everyone else, I’d say you’re better off taking a pass.
A review copy of Cradle was provided to Epic Brew by the developer.
