Cradle
Skip · Narrative · 2015
The verdict
SKIP IT.
The value isn't there at $12.99.
- Length
- 5.3h
- Value
- $2.45/hr
- Reviews
- 71% positive
Watch this gameOne email when it is worth buying. Your call on what that means.
Get one email when Cradle is worth buying.
One email per game. Unsubscribe in a click.
Minimum on the Steam store: 2 GB of memory, DirectX9c compliant card with 512MB, 3 GB of storage. Runs on Windows, Linux.
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.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
The lowest price on record is $1.94, set in November 2024. Its cuts run 70 percent off as a rule. There have been 52 in the 11 years tracked, about 7 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 27 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 7 weeks.
It is pricier than 75 percent of its genre, and less well reviewed than 74 percent. On the same math Obduction ($29.99, scores 43) and The Station ($14.99, scores 46) are the better buys, and they are the games it most resembles.
This site sampled 468 of its Steam-purchase reviews; none were written by buyers who refunded it, sampled from reviews written April 2020 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 32 percent of the 236 reviews written there were positive, against 71 percent overall, and those are 13 percent of everything written about it.
5.3 hours to finish it, 11 to exhaust it. The completionist tail is 2.1 times the campaign.
The drop-off
61% start to 2% rarestNo achievement in this game marks the ending, so there is no finish rate. The curve runs from the most-unlocked achievement to the rarest, and its shape is where players stop. Steam global achievements
What players say
This game is quite peculiar, and I almost fall into saying a product of it's time... but that's not exactly true. Maybe when the devs started working on it that would be true, but this was released in 2015 there were already plenty of indie games that went far and beyond this, both in gameplay and narrative. Firstly, even before I get to the gameplay, I must say that this running in Uningine is not helping the case...
I really liked the start of this game. Sci-fi setting, nice cozy yurt, trying to put a giant puzzle together. All things that make up games I like. Sadly, the gameplay quickly killed and detracted any good those aspects brought. Grabbing objects and using them has been a challenge. It was quite clunky. A few times I dropped objects and could hardly find them. Using items could be like having toddler arms where order...
A beautiful sci-fi game. While short, the story is really intriguing. I recommand however to spend some time to look for all the hidden notes as this is mandatory to understand the ending (check the achievements).
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
Embed the live badge, copy the line, or download the card.
Cradle scores 25/100 on the BANG Score (a skip). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/361550/cradleThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 23, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.