The wonderfully strange Cradle is out this month

Cradle

Two years ago this very month we were all like, "oooh, would you look at Cradle," a wonderfully odd first-person game featuring a robot girl, a flying bus, and many of the things that lie in-between. A release date eluded us at the time, but one's just been announced, and it's not very far away at all.

July 24th! Which is just under three weeks, calendar fans. To keep us going until then, developers Flying Cafe for Seminanimals have issued a 'pre-release teaser', which is a much better and more accurate name for the now-traditional launch trailer. Cradle looks scary and intriguing and unsettling and my cup of tea, and you'll find it on Steam in a few weeks.

Phillipa Warr spoke with creative director Ilya Tolmachev two years ago about the project, but if you want the short version, here's the slightly awkwardly translated YouTube description:

"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.”

Tom Sykes

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.