A.C.R.E. vs C.R.A.D.L.E. — Two Engines, One Wasteland

Two engines turned up on drive L: three days apart, and they want the same thing.

It is year 23 after the Flash. A school bus sits dead in the dust. Inside it a terminal wakes up, a handful of survivors gather round, and somewhere in the dirt are the ruins of the old world, waiting to be dug out and put back to work. Two-headed gekks are on the menu. At the end of the road stands a radio broadcast, the one thing that proves the colony is still alive.

That is the pitch of A.C.R.E., the Automated Colony Reconstruction Engine. It is also, almost word for word, the pitch of C.R.A.D.L.E., the Civil Reconstruction And Development Logistics Engine, which arrived three days later. Same bus. Same gekks. Same buried ruins. Same final broadcast.

Nothing in the surviving files explains why. No README mentions the other build, and nothing in either one says where the shared idea came from. What the files do show is more interesting than gossip: two different answers to one design question.

Same wasteland, different engines

A.C.R.E. is about the colony. You do not command five survivors; you are the terminal they switched on. The whole game fits in one HTML file that draws its own terrain, settlers and vehicles and composes its own music and sound effects. Every start rolls a new map across six biomes. Saves go to the browser and can be downloaded as a file. When the broadcast finally reaches the Coast, an armored convoy drives in along that map's own highway, and the settlers celebrate.

C.R.A.D.L.E. is about the unknown. Six survivors and a crate of gekk eggs, then darkness at the edge of the map. Distant ruins sit under the fog of war until a scout goes out from the bus to find them. Days turn to nights. The colony can actually die: if every settler dies or walks away, the game is lost. And it plays all of this in complete silence, with no music and no effects at all.

Who wins

The archive does not pick one. A.C.R.E. is the warmer and more finished of the two, with a soundtrack, save files and an ending worth waiting for. C.R.A.D.L.E. is colder and riskier, with something to find and something to lose. One builds a home; the other survives a frontier.

Play both. Start with the one whose idea of the end of the world sounds more like yours, then switch.

The next two pages are their build files.