Sharing a gameplay and narrative structure that is almost identical to their earlier title The Void, Cargo instead applies a surrealist and sickly veneer of hard primary colours peering through confetti and bric-à-brac. The vague metaphorical currencies and the omni-present omni-lying deities of The Void return with a Crash Bandicoot makeover and spend their time going into a warp frenzy about the Idiot Gamers and their lust for being filled with so much instant gratification that they burst. What you're left with is essentially the Slav Wattam.

Ice Pick Lodge are more qualified than practically any other studio to make a scathing satirical critique on the triple-A sausage machine, as well as the gormless piggies sanctimoniously gobbling the samey meat links churned endlessly out for carnal joy - but they don't have to be so mean about it. Cargo feels adolescent, lashing out at the industry that failed them and the audience that ignored them, an almost embarrassing "Nobody Understands Me" phase laid bare in a .exe. It's hard to hate a game that is this eccentric and I will give IPL every free pass I've got, it's a miracle they're even still standing. Cargo is just kind of all bark and no bite, dull to play and not even for the reasons it tries to be.

The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism by way of Noby Noby Boy and Banjo: Nuts and Bolts. I love a good industry polemic, and only Ice Pick Lodge (or like, Keita Takahashi/Yoko Taro) could deliver such a scathing satire of the market/cultural forces rendering Big Games™ into such braindead immediate gratification sludge with this much wit and eccentricity. The phantasmagoric grotesquerie of this visual universe is so peculiar; it's a scummy melange of Terry Gilliam, bootleg educational cgi kid's cartoon, and 90's faux-utopian "found art" park (think the St. Louis City museum or Austin's Cathedral of Junk). I love the headache-inducing maximalism and nails-on-a-chalkboard visual confrontation here, and the aesthetic is used to make some cutting points.

However, I cant fully get on board with this game because I feel like many of its most splenetic critiques come across as cynical, cruel, and directed at the wrong people. While the bitter bitch part of me DOES love the depiction of AAA game consumers as lobotomized crotchless potato babies, there's just a little too much "look at the piggie philistines eagerly slopping up garbage" energy in this, and I don't feel like its a particularly useful message coming from people who ostensibly believe in nurturing games as an expressive, mature medium (and have pushed the boundaries with their other titles in ways that eventually reached positive cult acclaim and reappraisal, changing some small semblance of the games community for the better IMO!). IPL are obviously a team that have been burned by financial struggle and frequent misinterpretation by games pundits/consumers, and I completely sympathize with their venomous attitude, but Cargo ends up a simplistic and inefficient critique--more of a troll than a thesis--because of it. It's a jaded dead end, uninterested in suggesting alternatives to this idiocy ouroboros or celebrating what more individuated, challenging games could be and do for people--it's all insult and no imagination, and the insults feel like hyperbolized projections that I don't buy as a reflection of the interiority of most gamers (even the DUMBEST ones that i HATE!!!). The fact that it exists is still cool as hell (A lot of my issues with Cargo are moreso that so few meaty self-reflexive games analyzing actual marketing and consumption exist to accompany/complement its very mean-spirited perspective) and I still prefer it as a piece of medium analysis over something like The Stanley Parable because it's eccentric and confounding and Slavic instead of droll and clinical and BRITISH!!!!!