Science fiction adventure from the GSC ? Excellent, give two! Employees of Flying Cafe for Semianimalsreally know how to intrigue the player. Although the whole action takes place on a patch of the Mongolian steppe, from the first minutes Cradle makes it clear that this is only the periphery of the vast world that survived the catastrophe. More than twenty years have passed since the Lilith epidemic cut the world's population by one and a half billion, making women infertile. For the sake of security and the preservation of civilization, some people have transferred their personalities to artificial bodies, but have added new ones to the old problems.
Even if you look at it from the wicked yurt, the world of 2076 is unlike the one to which we are accustomed. The wild steppe is crossed by a trunk of arches, under which a flying tram runs occasionally. On the trees near the lake, unprecedented fruit grows, and on the other side of the highway you can see the ruins of the amusement park "Garden Gerbera" - a gigantic dome in the middle of the steppe, where there is nothing to catch either a glance or, as it turns out, gameplay. In the yurt too, everything is not so simple: traditional clothes, a Buddhist altar, moth-eaten carpets, a stove-burzhuka and smoky pots adjoin with outlandish devices, the purpose of which becomes clear not immediately. Cradle intends to stun you to no lesser extent than a hero named Enebish - the memory of a Mongolian boy who lost his memory.
The universe of the game is miniature, only the dwelling of the hero and the Garden of Gerberas, but it is so attractive and mysterious that she desperately wants to explore. And not in breadth, but deep: if you just wander wherever your eyes look, then behind the next hillock Eneibish will collapse into a swoon. And there is nothing to do in the steppe - how rich are the details of the game locations, the neighborhood is so poor and soulless. But reading notes, newspaper clippings and even inscriptions on boxes sheds light on much. On the scale of the tragedy that has befallen humanity, on the cynical society, measuring in percentage the "beauty" of genes and rudely dealing with the rejected. Information a lot, but at first it does not add up to the overall picture.
Here, Enebish would have stumbled into a dead end, had it not been for the help of other characters: the robot girl Ida, the m-body with the person of the person inside, and Tabahi - the conductor of the flying tram. Ida itself restores memory by byte per hour, now and again demanding the replacement of parts that can be won in an abandoned amusement park. Unfortunately, having sent you there, adventure will lose some of the charm: in which pavilion you go, everywhere you are offered to play dice. Imagine yourself infested with Minecraft rabies, along with that mission from Mafia , where you have to carry boxes. Against the background of other tasks that encourage the use of logic at least at the household level, a mini-game with cubes looks so out of place, like it and the storyline of Cradle were originally different projects. But then they were combined, say, to stretch the time of passage to more or less decent four hours.
In short duration, of course, there is no harm. This does not spoil the impression of the game, and the cycles "brought a detail - learned a new piece of history" do not have time to turn into a routine. There is something to do here, and besides the iron lady upgrade. They make a variety and meetings with Tabaha, another person in the m-body, an equally important source of information, like a bezvylazno sitting in the yurt Ida. The eccentric conductor is not only the only connection of Enebish with the outside world, but also the key to the biography of the hero. It's a pity Tabach is constantly in a hurry, although he never has passengers. In the comrades of Enebisch, one could also write down the eagle's eagle, but he, like a bird, is not very talkative - much more eloquently than what you find when you prepare breakfast for him.
Cradle It borrows heavily from the works of Philip K. Dick (Philip Kindred Dick): hormonal TVs, trade genes sort of people beyond their attributes, transplantation of consciousness, artificial animals, as well as a hero who "remembers everything." Moreover, with the creativity of the famous science fiction, the game is related by a constant and ubiquitous "it's not what it seems". Paradoxically, this statement can be attributed to the entire Cradle as a whole.
Because of the interspersed terms, not always clear records and dialogues of adventure makes you strain the convolutions. However, it's worth taking a closer look - and magic dissipates. Is it necessary to call good and evil "trivial categories", but at the same time to reduce the explanation of complex things to emotions that "not describe"? In a world of the future where "even children know how to collect DNA," valuable substances are still extracted from human bodies, like insulin from pigs. When trying to collect this puzzle, questions arise without answers, and a grandiose hoax in the spirit of Pelevin turns into "Santa Barbara": it remains to be seen who and under what circumstances he saw and who to whom the relative.
Zaum, peculiar to ambitious indie projects, does not fit in with the simplicity of tasks and flaws like impossibility to miss another round of "cubes" until you lose in it. The tasks here are really simpler than they seem at first glance. To avoid critical spoilers, let's take the preparation of breakfast from the beginning of the game. In the tip it is written that the salt is to the right of the pepper, but it turns out that there are not two, but five indistinguishable cans on the shelf. The sophisticated player starts to look for a dirty trick or try the good old method of busting. In fact, everything is elementary: pepper is the most left bank, and the second behind it is salt. Similarly, other missions have been built, a fork is not provided here. But the meanings in the dialogues are branching, that the deer horns. It is difficult to look for a black cat in a dark room, especially if it is not there.
Meanwhile, the semantic bloating of the cheeks highlights really important things - something that Cradle is good at. The flawless design (one flying tram with the highway is already a lot), the exotic color, in which cyberpunk is blended, Mongolia and the apocalypse, a well-chosen soundtrack - all this raises the work of Flying Cafe for Semianimals over a heap of indie projects of recent times. And behind the scientific fraud are hidden damn accurate questions: for example, will consciousness, placed in the m-body, experience discomfort due to the inability to breathe? And do we need screens for communication between people, robbed in the body of robots, with the animation of the eyes, this mirror of the soul?
In Cradle, with all its powerful charm, only lovers of meditative walks like Dear Esther will return . Those who are waiting for the game of exciting gameplay, risk being disappointed in it. Adventure from Flying Cafe for Semianimals is reminiscent of a preparation for a larger project, a bright patch for the future and a demonstration of creativity, but not a full-fledged product from veterans of the industry. On the other hand, Cradle is inexpensive, it was created by the forces of a small studio, and the plot and entourage was invented by just one person - Ilya Tolmachyov, development manager. It is almost impossible to construct an original world of the future and save it from contradictions alone. And not everyone is given the opportunity to prepare such an injection of style, after which you ask yourself: what was that?
Rate:8/10
Nice