Cradle
Flying Cafe for Semianimals · 2015 · Adventure, Indie, Sci-fi, Atmospheric, First-Person
PC
Mostly Positive70% · 1,86165Metacritic
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About Cradle
✦ AI summary
Explore a mysterious robotized Mongolian steppe as you repair your mechanical companion and uncover the secrets of an abandoned entertainment park in this atmospheric first-person adventure. Cradle blends thoughtful exploration with dynamic puzzles, haunting ambient music, and a deeply layered story where every discovered detail—from scattered newspapers to NPC interactions—reshapes your understanding of what happened here.
Cradle is a sci-fi first-person-view quest designed for the player to explore the surrounding world. The story is built around the relations of the protagonist and a mechanical girl who by quirk of fate found themselves amidst the desert. The player’s task is to repair the mechanical body of his companion and solve the mystery of the neglected entertainment park located not far from the yurt together.
Thirty years ago in the mid-2040s the sweeping development of neuroscience stirred up the common anticipation of victory over aging and death. In 2047 the scientists of the Neurocopying Institute in Cologne run the first experiments on transferring human consciousness onto an artificial carrier. In the course of experiments a weird previously unregistered phenomenon was discovered - the copies of neurotic system of the test subjects awoken in the computational device began to self-destroy by immersing in a state of deep irrational fear.
The discovery of the mysterious phenomenon induced a string of events to have completely changed the society. Dozens of years later the question of the ‘Panic Attack’ nature still remains open. We do not know how far the researchers’ thought has led them in search of the answer, but we believe it hardly ever visited this Mongolian steppe.
Year 2076, Mongolia. You wake up in a yurt amidst the boundless steppes. You neither remember your name, nor are aware of how long you had slept. Who are you? Who is this mechanical girl sitting on the table and what is the number she has on her chest? Nearby there towers the dome of a neglected entertainment park. How did it appear in these desert lands? What has happened here? Look around and try to sort things out. You are to begin on a peculiar and a touching story.
Key Features
- Open World. Explore the mysterious and stylish world of the robotized Mongolia. Search the yurt, take a stroll down the river or head towards the entertainment park - this game has no fences you cannot overcome.
- Interactive Environment. Interact with objects - all of them bear a part of the story and most can be used in the gameplay.
- Living Characters. Communicate with NPCs. Owing to non-standard emotion display technology where actor eyes video is used, the NPCs in Cradle look as ‘live’ ones.
- Deep Story. Immerse into learning the thoroughly thought-out story. Every of its detail adds to the storyline, while a short newspaper slip accidentally found in the steppe could completely change the sense of the storyline.
- Varied Gameplay. Mix thoughtful exploration quests with bright and dynamic mini-games.
- Excquisite Soundtrack. Engulf the atmoshpere of mystery with the enchanting soundtrack of the game. Cradle contains 90 minutes of music including the meditative ambient, synthetic tracks and vocal compositions.
Storyline
Thirty years ago in the mid-2040s the sweeping development of neuroscience stirred up the common anticipation of victory over aging and death. In 2047 the scientists of the Neurocopying Institute in Cologne run the first experiments on transferring human consciousness onto an artificial carrier. In the course of experiments a weird previously unregistered phenomenon was discovered - the copies of neurotic system of the test subjects awoken in the computational device began to self-destroy by immersing in a state of deep irrational fear.
The discovery of the mysterious phenomenon induced a string of events to have completely changed the society. Dozens of years later the question of the ‘Panic Attack’ nature still remains open. We do not know how far the researchers’ thought has led them in search of the answer, but we believe it hardly ever visited this Mongolian steppe.
Year 2076, Mongolia. You wake up in a yurt amidst the boundless steppes. You neither remember your name, nor are aware of how long you had slept. Who are you? Who is this mechanical girl sitting on the table and what is the number she has on her chest? Nearby there towers the dome of a neglected entertainment park. How did it appear in these desert lands? What has happened here? Look around and try to sort things out. You are to begin on a peculiar and a touching story.
DLC & expansions
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Base game + 0 of 1 DLC at today's best prices (some DLC unpriced).
$11.69
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What Steam players say
Recent verbatim reviews from Steam — separate from playze.io community reviews below.
This game holds a lot of promise, bringing a charming environment, a rich universe, cute and inventive in-world puzzles, and a slightly smart story. It performs well, and the main-world mechanics are amusingly simulator-esque. But the game design is debilitating: the cube minigames you spend most of your playtime on are completely detached from all the above (limp narrative hand-waving notwithstanding) and have a control scheme only a developer could love. If you actually want to understand the story, get ready to scour several square kilometers of barren wasteland lightly glazed with a foliage tool for documents, of which most are banal flavor but a few are essential to comprehending the major narrative beats. I wish the whole game had been like its protasis, because that was delightful.1 found this helpful
A beautiful sci-fi game. While short, the story is really intriguing. I recommand however to spend some time to look for all the hidden notes as this is mandatory to understand the ending (check the achievements).1 found this helpful
Too badly optimized to play.
This game is quite peculiar, and I almost fall into saying a product of it's time... but that's not exactly true. Maybe when the devs started working on it that would be true, but this was released in 2015 there were already plenty of indie games that went far and beyond this, both in gameplay and narrative. Firstly, even before I get to the gameplay, I must say that this running in Uningine is not helping the case for this game at all. Unlike other engines, the version they used aged very poorly, with incredibly few resolution options, even for the time, and if you dare to alt-tab out of the game... well, you'll find a new special kind of software/control hellscape. If you could at least save on demand, but no, the game only autosaves after completing each task, so if you leave on halfway you neet to restart it, and the tasks... The tasks, most of the gameplay, let's be honest, is tedious. This is a mix of a point and click type puzzle done through the mechanics of walking simulator trying to be an immersive sim, and failing at all points. There are too many objects that you can interact with, the instructions are not clear, and most of the time you cannot figure out if you'…
A very captivating story for 1-2 evenings with an unusual atmosphere!
Eh, too laggy to play. I think I'll just watch someone play through it on youtube. Got it on sale, so no biggee
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