Hi there! We released the Cradle soundtrack on all popular platforms. We were lucky to work with such talented composers as Egor Arkhipov, Julia Butenko, Taras Korostashov, Valentine Parkhomenko and Sergiy Tomashevs'kyj. Thank you for your contribution to the world of Cradle. Gre
Hi there!
We released the Cradle soundtrack on all popular platforms. We were lucky to work with such talented composers as Egor Arkhipov, Julia Butenko, Taras Korostashov, Valentine Parkhomenko and Sergiy Tomashevs'kyj. Thank you for your contribution to the world of Cradle. Great work!
Hello everyone! Good news: we have launched French and Turkish localizations today! Thanks Thierry Bégaud, Gaia Habert and Stéphanie Menu from Words of Magic for the help with French translation and proofreading! Thanks Çınar Tuncer, Alp Sezer Orak, Bedirhan Köse, Ceyhun Özgöç an
Hello everyone!
Good news: we have launched French and Turkish localizations today!
Thanks Thierry Bégaud, Gaia Habert and Stéphanie Menu from Words of Magic for the help with French translation and proofreading!
Thanks Çınar Tuncer, Alp Sezer Orak, Bedirhan Köse, Ceyhun Özgöç and Cem Filiz from Crewals for the help with Turkish translation and proofreading!
Hello everyone! Good news: we have launched French and Turkish localizations today! Thanks Thierry Bégaud, Gaia Habert and Stéphanie Menu from Words of Magic for the help with French translation and proofreading! Thanks Çınar Tuncer, Alp Sezer Orak, Bedirhan Köse, Ceyhun Özgöç an
Hello everyone!
Good news: we have launched French and Turkish localizations today!
Thanks Thierry Bégaud, Gaia Habert and Stéphanie Menu from Words of Magic for the help with French translation and proofreading!
Thanks Çınar Tuncer, Alp Sezer Orak, Bedirhan Köse, Ceyhun Özgöç and Cem Filiz from Crewals for the help with Turkish translation and proofreading!
Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time. Have you played Cradle ? I previewed Cradle but only just got around to playing the full game. So far I’m only part of the way through so I won’t be checking the
Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.
Have you played Cradle [official site]? I previewed Cradle but only just got around to playing the full game. So far I’m only part of the way through so I won’t be checking the comments for fear of spoilers but it’s already been so rewarding.
Today's Deal: Save 15% on Cradle !* Look for the deals each day on the front page of Steam. Or follow us on twitter or Facebook for instant notifications wherever you are! *Offer ends Tuesday at 10AM Pacific Time
Today's Deal: Save 15% on Cradle!*
Look for the deals each day on the front page of Steam. Or follow us on twitter or Facebook for instant notifications wherever you are!
Hi everybody! We have released a new Cradle update introducing the changes as follows: — Bug causing performance drops when gamepad disconnected has been fixed. Thanks the colleagues from Unigine for that! — Spanish localization has been added. Thanks Vanesa Gómez Paniza and Agus
Hi everybody!
We have released a new Cradle update introducing the changes as follows:
— Bug causing performance drops when gamepad disconnected has been fixed. Thanks the colleagues from Unigine for that!
— Spanish localization has been added. Thanks Vanesa Gómez Paniza and Agustín Zammarrelli from ZombieWolf Team for the translation and proofreading!
Hi everybody! We have released a new Cradle update introducing the changes as follows: — Bug causing performance drops when gamepad disconnected has been fixed. Thanks the colleagues from Unigine for that! — Spanish localization has been added. Thanks Vanesa Gómez Paniza and Agus
Hi everybody!
We have released a new Cradle update introducing the changes as follows:
— Bug causing performance drops when gamepad disconnected has been fixed. Thanks the colleagues from Unigine for that!
— Spanish localization has been added. Thanks Vanesa Gómez Paniza and Agustín Zammarrelli from ZombieWolf Team for the translation and proofreading!
Dear friends! We are glad to inform Cradle has now been updated: The update includes German and Polish localization, as well as the following fixes: — Gamepad support added. Find the controls layout in the Options menu. — Alternative controls keys on the num pad added. — Camera F
Dear friends!
We are glad to inform Cradle has now been updated: The update includes German and Polish localization, as well as the following fixes:
— Gamepad support added. Find the controls layout in the Options menu. — Alternative controls keys on the num pad added. — Camera FOV options added to the Settings. — Inverted mouse option added. — Mouse sensitivity range increased. — FPS drops, freezes on loading textures partially fixed. — Player getting stuck in geometry fixed. — A number of mistakes in the Ukrainian localization corrected. — Error when launching the game under Linux fixed.
We are getting the French localization of the game ready for launch too.
Dear friends! We are glad to inform Cradle has now been updated: The update includes German and Polish localization, as well as the following fixes: — Gamepad support added. Find the controls layout in the Options menu. — Alternative controls keys on the num pad added. — Camera F
Dear friends!
We are glad to inform Cradle has now been updated: The update includes German and Polish localization, as well as the following fixes:
— Gamepad support added. Find the controls layout in the Options menu. — Alternative controls keys on the num pad added. — Camera FOV options added to the Settings. — Inverted mouse option added. — Mouse sensitivity range increased. — FPS drops, freezes on loading textures partially fixed. — Player getting stuck in geometry fixed. — A number of mistakes in the Ukrainian localization corrected. — Error when launching the game under Linux fixed.
We are getting the French localization of the game ready for launch too.
Hi there! We are ready to release the update for Cradle in couple of days. The update includes German and Polish localization, as well as following fixes: — Gamepad support added. Find the controls layout in the Options menu. — Alternative controls keys on the num pad added. — Ca
Hi there! We are ready to release the update for Cradle in couple of days. The update includes German and Polish localization, as well as following fixes:
— Gamepad support added. Find the controls layout in the Options menu. — Alternative controls keys on the num pad added. — Camera FOV options added to the Settings. — Inverted mouse option added. — Mouse sensitivity range increased. — FPS drops, freezes on loading textures partially fixed. — Player getting stuck in geometry fixed. — A number of mistakes in the Ukrainian localization corrected. — Error when launching the game under Linux fixed.
We are getting the French localization of the game ready for launch. Stay in touch!
Hi there! We are ready to release the update for Cradle in couple of days. The update includes German and Polish localization, as well as following fixes: — Gamepad support added. Find the controls layout in the Options menu. — Alternative controls keys on the num pad added. — Ca
Hi there! We are ready to release the update for Cradle in couple of days. The update includes German and Polish localization, as well as following fixes:
— Gamepad support added. Find the controls layout in the Options menu. — Alternative controls keys on the num pad added. — Camera FOV options added to the Settings. — Inverted mouse option added. — Mouse sensitivity range increased. — FPS drops, freezes on loading textures partially fixed. — Player getting stuck in geometry fixed. — A number of mistakes in the Ukrainian localization corrected. — Error when launching the game under Linux fixed.
We are getting the French localization of the game ready for launch. Stay in touch!
My good friend, Ida. Cradle is the worst good (or best bad) game I've played in a while. It's a charming, confused piece of work that succeeds despite itself. The puzzles are bad, and the whole thing is strange and discordant—an unevenly translated Ukranian adventure game about t
My good friend, Ida.
[Note: This article has some spoilers, so I highly recommend playing Cradle first. It's cheap.]
Cradle is the worst good (or best bad) game I've played in a while. It's a charming, confused piece of work that succeeds despite itself. The puzzles are bad, and the whole thing is strange and discordant—an unevenly translated Ukranian adventure game about transhumanism (the evolution of humankind through technology), nature, identity, and preparing food for a giant cybernetic eagle.
But Kiev-based studio Flying Cafe for Semianimals have ultimately delivered a rare breed of game. It's great because of its flaws, and while I don't know if it'll ever gain popular recognition, Cradle will certainly resonate with a niche audience over time. Like a cult film, it'll be one to share with friends, enjoying its heart and its blunders together.
Yurt telling me!
As Cradle begins, I wake up in a yurt in future rural Mongolia, and am prompted to prepare a brew for an impending airborne guest. Garish on-screen text guides me, overlaying an incredibly dense domestic scene. The yurt is littered with mementos, and there are plenty of drawers to rifle through. There s lots of visual information I can use to form an unrefined idea of my blank slate character, but looking at this stuff is mostly optional. The majority of my time is spent fumbling with found objects to achieve directed goals, like looking through cabinets to find a bowl, filling it with water, and starting a fire in the stove.
It s very much traditional adventure game action, in that I have an inventory and I m using objects on one another to complete tasks (but I would hesitate to say I ever solved any complex puzzles). I figure the entire game will just take place in this small abode, a micro imitation of Gone Home, but then the text prompt tells me to go outside.
One of many gorgeous vistas.
The first time I open the door of my yurt, I'm awed. I see a lovely pastoral scene, green hills lolling into an infinite horizon, trees and rocks dotting the landscape, and sunlight glinting off a river in the foothills. It's a relieving departure from typical sci-fi fare, where everything, top to bottom, is metal and beeps. An on-screen prompt tells me to find some fruit for the brew down by the water. So I eagerly venture out. With a bit of trouble and time, I find the tree, but the fruit is too high to reach. Ah, a puzzle. I trust my logic and figure I have to throw something up there to knock the fruit down. After a brief survey of my surroundings, I try to pick up one of the sticks littering the ground. But I can t.
The sticks are firmly bolted to the artificial gameworld ground. I click like a jackhammer. Come here, stick. At this point, clicking away, I remember my right index finger is attached to my hand, which joins at the wrist to my forearm, and so on, until I m completely aware of my body. And some of the magic is gone.
The inconsistencies in what I can interact with and can t are jarring, especially when I was encouraged to interact with everything in the yurt. I m forced to abandon logic because the game won t support it. I have to truck back to the yurt, pick up a bowl, and throw it into the tree to get at the fruit. If it weren t for Cradle s ability to awe and intrigue me with the way it slowly reveals itself, this might have been where I stopped playing normally—but when I finished the brew, my guest arrived. It was a massive cybernetic eagle named Ongot. There was a hole in its chest with a letter inside. That s one way to set a hook.
Of several minds
One hour in, I throw some flowers into a phtyo-copier that looks straight out of Office Space 2020—yeah, hypothetical future tech that literally clones the genetic code of a flower and captures the sensation of being incredibly tedious to use.
Ida talked me through it. She s a real human in data form installed on a robot in my yurt. I found clues left to me by a family member and dug her consciousness—or at least the data containing a copy of it—out from beneath a tree. Throughout Cradle, you ll be replacing Ida s parts and talking to her. With each new part, you'll have to open her up while she talks you through it. Her scared dialogue ("Here come the shakes again...") does well to humanize her and give weight to otherwise routine actions. Both of you are attempting to reconcile your past. Why did your family hide her and leave clues to her data disk s whereabouts? What does she know about you? About herself? The mysterious, rundown amusement park in the distance? There s plenty to unearth here.
Before you copy the flowers, you have to find a few healthy ones.
The setting feeds into an overarching sense of decay and a fight for renewal. Everything is in a state of disrepair: Ida is assembling (literally and figuratively) her identity and in turn, filling in the blanks of the player s history.
Through interacting with Ida, Cradle blooms. It becomes a rare game that embraces subtly at the risk of alienating the easily bored. She s able to explore more of her memory banks as the story progresses, which leads to large bouts of exposition, but in a game that implies an unknown history and world state, the spoon fed information is welcome. That said, over the four or five hours I spent with Cradle, I never felt like I completely grasped what had happened to set up its rusty, transhumanist circumstance, but I also didn t feel like knowing was necessary.
There was no aha moment where the science-fiction coalesced into a cerebral bullet and blew out the back of my cyborg skull. Instead, Cradle banks on quiet clues scattered throughout the environments and conversations with the few supporting characters to evoke a sense of depth. These characters and conversations are only the tip of a very large iceberg chilling beneath the surface. A shame the block puzzles didn t take a dive too.
Blocked off
Shortly after meeting Ida, I explore the top tier of an abandoned amusement park—I m looking for a new lens so she can see again. I enter a padded, windowless room. The lights dim, my vision fades, and the instructions for a virtual block-based puzzle game appear on screen. It s here where the tone of Cradle changes significantly, from Gone Home to Go home, block minigames, you re drunk.
Goal: find thirty pink cubes. Oh boy!
The music goes funky, textures soften up and glow, and you re asked to dash around an environment composed of brightly colored cubes to collect, well, a certain amount of certain brightly colored cubes. For a game so grounded in its own reality, playing mundane arcade block-collecting games, metaphor or not, felt beside the point.
And they re bad. Really bad. Platforming is loose and floaty, picking up and throwing objects is more cumbersome than it should be, and even though the lucid stages function as metaphor in the narrative, I still can t understand how they couldn t have been something much simpler. As it stands, they muddy Cradle s pace, but skirt by on their baffling novelty, charming in the same vein as popcorn sex. At their worst, they re inoffensive and never too difficult. I just—why?
The good news: There aren t many, and after each, I took a massive slide back to the ground floor of the amusement park to pass on my prizes to Ida.
Volatile memory
Cradle s wild turns in narrative and design make it feel out of place in the modern gaming sphere, like it came out in the early nineties with modern technology—more than once I wondered if it had translation issues, but I resisted the urge to do any research until I d finished. And strangely, though it did have translation problems, they were to Cradle s benefit. The strange errors in dialogue and writing didn't prevent me from understanding what I heard or read, but colored it with the impression that I was somewhere familiar, only obscured by time and place. That is, except for the time I was told to search for an object near a lake only to find out it was referring to a small pond. That was a lot of wasted walking.
The ideas in Cradle are so wildly incongruent that they evoke a discordant charm.
The density of blunders gave me the eerie sense that Cradle is some future, more evolved human s approximation of what an adventure game might have been to former humans, cobbled together from weather worn bits and pieces, loose assemblages of history and stories—exploration and bad minigames.
But all the ideas in Cradle are so wildly incongruent that they evoke a discordant charm. The shifts in tone and action forced me to reorient myself every time, which was its own game of sorts. Everything wrong with Cradle is somehow right in its greater context, and it s because of this weirdly paradoxical state that it feels like a secret. Like a cult film, it's a secret I want to share with the people I know best, giving the narrative its deserved attention and care and inquisition while laughing together at the charming missteps.
Cradle is a bold, imaginative and shocking piece of science fiction that comes to us in the body of a first-person adventure game. Transhumanism, block-based arcade puzzles, time-consuming object hunts and some of the smartest writing in the medium are waiting out on the steppe.
Cradle [official site] is a bold, imaginative and shocking piece of science fiction that comes to us in the body of a first-person adventure game. Transhumanism, block-based arcade puzzles, time-consuming object hunts and some of the smartest writing in the medium are waiting out on the steppe. Here’s wot I think.
We can finally find out what the ‘H E double-hockeysticks’ Cradle is. Snips and smidgens from screenshots and videos have shown a strange abandoned theme park on lonely steppe, gathering and analysing flowers, a hovertram driven by a robotic grandpa, a robolady we need to rebuild
We can finally find out what the ‘H E double-hockeysticks’ Cradle [official site] is. Snips and smidgens from screenshots and videos have shown a strange abandoned theme park on lonely steppe, gathering and analysing flowers, a hovertram driven by a robotic grandpa, a robolady we need to rebuild in a yurt, and big colourful neon cubearenas. No idea.
I’m keen to find out though, and it launched on Saturday – available for Windows and Linux on Steam for 9.99.
Cradle is Now Available on Steam! 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 pla
Cradle is Now Available on Steam!
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.
