Cradle Gameplay Trailer is Lovely and Confusing

The first Cradle gameplay video is a lovely look at some bizarre in-game action.

Cradle landed on my plate last month and, as a fan of Ukrainian videogame oddities, I immediately snapped to attention. The announcement trailer was fascinating and beautiful, and also totally beyond comprehension, with a deactivated robot girl, a Mongolian yurt and some sort of decaying, futuristic amusement park. As a teaser, it most certainly teased.

But now we have an actual gameplay video, which by all rights should cast some proper light on things, right? Well, no. If anything, it’s more confusing than ever; it all seems fairly normal, at least as much as something of this nature can be, but then you go for a ride on some kind of big hover-coaster thing and end up inside a huge, 3D platformer arena that looks vaguely like an early iteration of a Portal level, and any sense of, well, “sense” falls apart.

The mechanics look fairly straightforward and imply a decent degree of interactivity, and I can’t help but be intrigued by that high-tech magnifying glass and the CSI deep fryer thing. I still have no idea whether or not this game will be any good, but I’m sure having fun with it so far.

Cradle, the debut offering from Flying Cafe for Semianimals, is set to launch on the PC sometime this spring, with other, unspecified platforms expected to follow.