A brief description:

Cradle is a sci-fi, atmospheric, walking-simulator puzzle game. The premise of the game is that you wake up in a yurt somewhere in the Mongolian steppes, not remembering who you are or why you’re there. You find a broken robot woman in your yurt and decide to fix her to see if she can help you recover your memory. As you progress through the game, you learn more about yourself, the robot woman, and the catastrophic condition of humankind.

From the store page images and videos, you might get the sense that this is a (possibly large) open-world game, but it is not. The game takes place in two main locations, and walking to and from each location is a not-insignificant amount of the gameplay. This is also not a “choices matter” type of puzzle game, and the dialog you see in the videos are just scripted exposition dumps – your conversation choices don’t matter.
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3492792908

Why I don’t recommend it:

The story of Cradle is interesting but is poorly fleshed out. Far too much of the story has to be pieced together by the player across scattered papers and pages, some of which are difficult to locate, and some of which are not readily identifiable as interactive objects. The game would benefit from less “hinting” at the story and more “showing.” I would have also liked to see fewer exposition dumps, which were usually unclear, vague, or “mysterious,” which was a bit frustrating. I don’t want to read through long conversations and get little to nothing out of them. Maybe I wasn’t doing a good job piecing together the story on my own, but at some point the fault has to lay more on the game’s writing and less on me, the player. I’m up for mystery games where I have to put the clues together myself, but this game takes it too far.

In addition to the lackluster storytelling, I spent far too much time traveling between locations or running around trying to figure out what the game wanted me to do. Thankfully, the game has a built-in “hint”/quest reminder mechanism so you can quickly see what it is you’re supposed to be doing (and I leaned on this quite heavily), but I was left hanging a lot when I understood what the game wanted from me but couldn’t figure out how to accomplish the task. For example, one of the very first tasks the game gives you is to get some fruit out of some nearby trees. I tried multiple solutions but nothing worked. A guide on Steam said to pick up a stick and throw it at the fruit to knock them out, but I wasn’t able to interact with any of the sticks anywhere near the trees. Was I not finding the “right” stick? I have no idea. I found someone else with the same problem who said they were able to jump up and grab a fruit and use that one to throw it at another. This solution worked for me, but it’s frustrating that none of my other ideas worked. Why couldn’t I grab any of the sticks or rocks scattered nearby? These seemed like sensible options to me, but I wasn’t able (or allowed) to use them. This didn’t happen often, but the fact that it happened at all was problematic. As a player, I get frustrated that I’m feeling reduced to pixel-hunting, brute forcing, or seeing that none of the solutions I come up with worked to solve the puzzle.

TL;DR The story is meh, there’s too much exposition dumping, there’s way too much time spent walking between locations, the puzzles aren’t always clear and/or it isn’t clear how the player is expected to solve the puzzle
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3492792861

The Good:

• The soundtrack was okay, but the music would cut in and out. Maybe based on my location? Not sure. I would have liked if it was always playing.
  
• The art is interesting, but it’ll make your PC chug like crazy if you turn your graphic settings up
  
• I did like the idea of the story, but the storytelling strategies and mechanisms fall short of telling a good, developed story
  
• It's short so I didn't have to suffer the cube mini-game for very long :P

https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3492792878

The Bad:

• The cube mini-game, which is something you will spend a lot of your time on, is universally reviled in the reviews for this game. I was no fan of them, either. It’s such a jarring switch to go from the yurt and the broken down “amusement park” to this cartoony, Minecraft-y cube mini-game. I honestly have no idea what the developers were thinking adding this to Cradle. It’s such a strange choice and doesn’t fit the rest of the game at all.
  
• Story is good but not told well
  
• Too much exposition dumping – too much “tell,” not enough “show” (and sometimes not even enough “tell”)
  
• Borders on becoming a walking simulator. I’d go so far as to say I spent a third of my time playing (possibly more) just walking between locations.
  
• What the game wants you to do isn’t always clear. I couldn’t always tell right away what the puzzle was that it wanted me to do, and sometimes I couldn’t figure out how it wanted me to solve the puzzle. I’m under the impression that there were some things I was supposed to be able to do (like throwing the stick at the fruit, as I mentioned above) that just weren’t working for me. I’m not sure about that, though, but sometimes it felt that way.
  
• There were far too many times that the game would teach me how to do something for a puzzle (for example, the “genometer” or whatever it was called), and then never have me use it again. Given the prevalence of the flowers in the yurt (the ones pressed between glass you can see in my screenshots), I thought these were going to play a larger role in the game. They did not.
  
• The ending is abrupt and makes no sense. I had to read through discussions about the ending to make any sense of it. Even after reading some plausible fan theories, I still don't think it makes much sense. If the fan theories are correct, the developers needed to lengthen the game to spend more time on the story. I have so many unanswered questions still, and I was surprised the game ended where it did.