A sci-fi adventure from people from G.S.C? Great, give me two! Employees Flying Cafe for Semianimals really know how to intrigue the player. Although the whole action takes place on a piece of the Mongolian steppe, from the first minutes Cradle makes it clear that this is only the periphery of a huge world that has survived the catastrophe. More than twenty years have passed since the Lilith epidemic reduced the Earth’s population by one and a half billion, making women infertile. For the sake of safety and the preservation of civilization, some people transferred their personalities into artificial m-bodies, but thereby added new ones to old problems.
Melancholy for three
Even if you look at it from a fenced-in yurt, the world of 2076 is not like the one we are used to. The wild steppe is crossed by a highway of arches, under which a flying tram occasionally runs. Unprecedented fruits grow on the trees near the lake, and on the other side of the highway you can see the ruins of the Gerber Garden amusement park – a gigantic dome in the middle of the steppe, where there is nothing to catch either the eye or, as it turns out, the gameplay. In the yurt, too, not everything is so simple: traditional clothes, a Buddhist altar, moth-eaten carpets, a potbelly stove and smoked pots coexist with outlandish devices, the purpose of which is not immediately clear. Cradle intends to stun you no less than the hero named Enebish – a Mongolian guy who has lost his memory.
The game’s universe is miniature, just the hero’s home and the “Gerbera Garden,” but it’s so attractive and mysterious that you inevitably want to explore it. And not in breadth, but in depth: if you just wander wherever your eyes look, then behind the next hill Enebish will faint. And there’s nothing to do in the steppe – no matter how rich in details the game locations are, their surroundings are just as poor and soulless. But reading notes, newspaper clippings and even inscriptions on boxes sheds light on a lot. On the scale of the tragedy that has befallen humanity, on a cynical society that measures the “beauty” of genes as a percentage and treats the rejected ones rudely. There is a lot of information, but at first it doesn’t add up to the overall picture.
Here Enebish would have reached a dead https://24-casino.uk/games/ end, if not for the help of other characters: the robot girl Ida, an m-body with a human personality inside, and Tabahi, the conductor of the flying tram. Ida herself restores her memory at the rate of a byte per hour, every now and then demanding replacement parts that can be won in an abandoned amusement park. Unfortunately, by sending you there, the adventure game will lose some of its charm: no matter what pavilion you go to, everyone offers to play with cubes. Imagine being infected with rabies Minecraft coupled with that mission from Mafia, where to carry boxes. Compared to other tasks that encourage the use of logic at least at the everyday level, the mini-game with cubes looks so out of place, as if it were part of the plot Cradle were originally different projects. But then they were combined, say, to stretch the passage time to a more or less decent four hours.
Of course, there is no harm in short duration. This does not spoil the impression of the game at all, and the cycles “brought a part – learned a new piece of history” do not have time to turn into a routine. There is something to do here besides upgrading the Iron Lady. Meetings with Tabakha, another person in the m-body, as important a source of information as Ida, who constantly sits in the yurt, also add variety. The eccentric conductor is not only Enebish’s only connection with the outside world, but also the key to the hero’s biography. It’s a pity, Tabakha is always in a hurry to get somewhere, although he never has passengers. One could also count the golden eagle Ongots as Enebish’s comrade, but he, as befits a bird, is not particularly talkative – much more eloquent is what you discover when you prepare breakfast for him.
Do Mongols dream of electric horses??
Cradle borrows a lot from works Philip K Dick (Philip Kindred Dick): hormonal televisions, gene trading, sorting people based on characteristics beyond their control, consciousness transplants, artificial animals, and a hero who “remembers everything”. Moreover, the game is similar to the work of the famous science fiction writer by the constant and ubiquitous “it’s not what it seems”. Paradoxically, this statement can be applied to all Cradle generally.
Because of the terms and not always clear notes and dialogues, adventure games force you to strain your brains. However, if you take a closer look, the magic dissipates. Is it really necessary to call good and evil “trivial categories”, but at the same time reduce the explanation of complex things to emotions that “cannot be described”? In a future world where “even children can collect DNA,” valuable substances are still extracted from human bodies like insulin from pigs. When trying to put this puzzle together, unanswered questions arise, and a grandiose hoax in the spirit Pelevin turns into “Santa Barbara”: all that remains is to keep track of who saw whom and under what circumstances and who is related to whom.
The arrogance inherent in ambitious indie projects does not fit in with the simplicity of the tasks and flaws like the inability to skip the next round of “cubes” until you lose in it. The tasks here are really simpler than they seem at first glance. To avoid major spoilers, let’s take the breakfast preparation from the beginning of the game. The clue says that salt is to the right of pepper, but it turns out there are not two, but five indistinguishable cans on the shelf. A sophisticated player begins to look for a trick or try the good old method of brute force. In fact, everything is elementary: pepper is the leftmost jar, and the second one behind it is salt. Other missions are constructed in a similar way; there are no forks here. But the meanings in the dialogues branch like deer antlers. It’s hard to look for a black cat in a dark room, especially if it’s not there.
Beauty requires sacrifice
Meanwhile, the semantic swelling of the cheeks highlights the really important things – what Cradle good. Impeccable design (one flying tram and a highway are already worth a lot), an exotic flavor that mixes cyberpunk, Mongolia and the apocalypse, a well-chosen soundtrack – all this elevates the work Flying Cafe for Semianimals over a heap of recent indie projects. And hidden behind the scientific falsifications are some damn accurate questions: for example, will a consciousness placed in an m-body experience discomfort due to the inability to breathe?? And are screens with animated eyes, this mirror of the soul, needed for communication between people imprisoned in robot bodies??
IN Cradle, for all its powerful charm, only those who like meditative walks like Dear Esther. Those who expect exciting gameplay from the game risk being disappointed in it. Adventure from Flying Cafe for Semianimals rather resembles a preparation for a larger project, a bright foundation for the future and a demonstration of creative potential, but not a full-fledged product from industry veterans. On the other side, Cradle is inexpensive, was created by a small studio, and the plot and surroundings were invented by just one person – Ilya Tolmachev, development manager. It is almost impossible to construct an original world of the future and rid it of contradictions alone. And not everyone can prepare such an injection of style, after which you wonder: what was it??
Pros: it’s beautiful; exotic surroundings, which cannot be found anywhere else; good music; you can look for the deeper meaning.
Cons: cubes; the gameplay often evokes melancholy; you don’t have to look for deeper meaning.