Cargo! The Quest for Gravity

As mental as this all sounds, there is some semblance of a plot. On the main island there's a series of monorails that carry three giant masks, each of them a weird Aztec-steampunk mix of pistons and vivid colours, that claim to be manifestations of the same deity. Except they're clearly robots. Either way, they were the ones to order the parts that you were bringing, and it is they that want you to fix everything – although they don't really, because you're a human, and humans are unpredictable.

The masks are there to provide some sort of order to the chaos and give you some clue as to what you're supposed to be doing next, because otherwise it all gets very unclear. Cargo! is so consistently scattered and surreal that it's often extremely vague what you need to be doing, and, once you've figured that out, why you're doing it. It certainly fits with the atmosphere of the game, but it can become easily frustrating.

Fortunately, your objective is often found in whatever surreal construct you've caused to come crashing down to Earth most recently, and as these take up a good chunk of your horizon, finding your way to them is more a question of how than where. The how usually involves either helicopter blades or more balloons than a birthday clown. It's often only when something as simple as a mini-map is taken away that you realise quite how useful they are; but, at the very least, its absence allows the screen to be taken up by the scenery, and whatever thing you're currently piloting.

It's worth having those extra few bits of screen, because Cargo! often looks stunning. It's equal parts Dali and Gilliam, and easily more vivid and over-saturated than either. The waters surrounding the islands are rippled mirrors, while the islands themselves are covered in alien trees, each a different, completely unnatural colour. Even the airship you arrived in has a patchwork balloon, each strip a different shade. As you call more and more things down from the atmosphere the game world turns from tranquility to complete visual chaos, with the recognisable mixed in with the completely confusing at every turn.

It would be easy to call the gravity-focused premise light – and beyond the vast possibilities found within the vehicle constructor, it's true that there isn't a great deal to do in Cargo!. But that isn't necessarily a bad thing, because even though there are a few distractions (finding musical notes that make the buddies congregate and dance; calling down anvils, pianos, and jukeboxes from above; searching for vehicle blueprints), this game isn't intended to be particularly deep or complex.

It's not trying to challenge you and its main focus, if the message wasn't quite clear enough, is FUN. This is Ice Pick Lodge breaking from the tradition they've made for themselves, pulling back from the bleak and challenging, to create something frivolous, vibrant and resolutely silly. From the omnipresent brass band to the constantly bickering robot-gods, this isn't a world we're supposed to take seriously.

Cargo! is not without a few problems: sometimes it takes away your vehicle without warning, leaving you without components or the vast reservoirs of FUN required to buy them back, and some of the tasks you're set are rather esoteric, but these are niggles rather than whopping great issues. Even if you do find yourself alone and without FUN, you can always just kick the nearest Buddy in the arse, netting you a few hundred points to spend on setting up your new vehicle. Or you can make them dance, because everyone likes a party.

Cargo! is a game worth playing. It's a singular experience in a unique world that's pretty much worth the entry fee on its own. In the end, you're going to get out what you put in, because the fun (FUN) is had in creating monstrous, convoluted and quite possibly functionless vehicles. It's about putting a life-saver directly underneath a helicopter blade, and then putting your palm to your face when the buddies get tangled in the rotors. Fundamentally, it's about having FUN – because FUN is important.