The first time you walk down the steps into its basement, when you know nothing, it's devastating. Well, when mapping a section for this feature, I physically screamed when one of the inmates pulled himself from the ground unexpectedly and lurched to attack.Īnd these touches unnerve on every journey into The Cradle. No matter how long you stay, there's always another detail to shake you when you're getting too comfy, like realising the lights in the building pulse, as if they were slowly breathing, or. The art here is to not be wrong (as in not correct) but Wrong (as in so close to being normal. They move as if their insides are about to split or their bones have been broken and set at off-angles. Take the Cradle's inhabitants-the puppets, whose movements are carefully judged to appear unnatural. After all-there are visual tricks as disturbing as the Devil's Interval to apply. On the visual side, things are just as deliberately wrong. And, most memorably, as you inch up towards the attic, the sounds of room-shaking violence that either petrify you or send you running back the way you came. The flickering of lights wouldn't be the same without the tiny crackle. Moments of plot-revelation are provided a chilling counterpoint by an apposite ghostly sound effect-find the ashes of a baby, still in a crib, and expect to be haunted by its cry from beyond the grave. Distant sounds rise up, suggesting the scuttling of unknown things moving elsewhere, up to no good. Mostly a drunken miasma of sound is smeared across your speakers, making you uneasy until an unexpected noise splits asunder. His Thief and System Shock 2 credits make as fine a resumé for horror as anyone in the business, but The Cradle is absolute career-best work. Sound-man Eric Brosius? He'd have been burned as a witch. But since the idea was hinted, and you made the dreadful leap of logic yourself, you accept. If it was just told to you, you might have rejected it as simply that. The idea of the criminally insane intermixed with the stray children of a city is a horrendous concept, pure melodrama. Madness is the most frightening thing in the world, and an asylum its church.
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But when I visited him, in halls that stunk of disinfectant, full of people who only looked at you through drugged eyes, laughter was impossible. The cliché's true: you have to laugh, or else you cry. A few years ago, one of my friends was sectioned, believing he was either the Anti-Christ, the Son of God or Muad'Dib from the Dune books. It's only when you're inside, reading a child's scribbled note, that you realise The Cradle served both purposes at the same time. You're told that before that it was an orphanage. You're told from the start that it used to be a madhouse. It's this process of realisation that provides some of the most disturbing moments in The Cradle. It gives you clues, and you tell the story to yourself. The truth is only approached tangentially, in the non-linear method of storytelling entirely unique to games. The level's genius is that it never explicitly states its purpose. It's probably the scariest level ever made, an experiment in non-linear storytelling methods that pays off handsomely and a towering achievement for games. While The Cradle is based on Thief's shadow-stalking mandate, and a clear extrapolation from the first Thief's seminal Return to the Haunted Cathedral, it has amplified its source material to become something quite different. It's what's known in television parlance as a "format breaker"-something that subverts many of the set expectations of the show to stir the critical palette into new life. The Cradle is the penultimate level in Thief: Deadly Shadows. Your head pushed beneath murky waters until you choke and drown.
If The Cradle is about anything, it's immersion. To be immersed is to be surrounded and submerged, thrust into a new context. People bandy the word "immersive" around when discussing videogames, but miss the subtext of what they're really talking about. Running from The Cradle is like running from the air around you. The interview with Jordan 'Null' Thomas, The Cradle's designer, should be safe.
The mapped section should be viewed in the same way as a walkthrough for a game you haven't played. If you've never played The Cradle, but plan to… be careful. If you've never played The Cradle, and have no plans to ever do so, then rush right in, and more fool you. The secrets and hidden stories of this house of hell are explored, analysed and constructed into something that will hopefully enhance and illuminate the experience you've had. If you've played The Cradle-Thief: Deadly Shadows' centrepiece level- then don't hang back. The following forms a journey into one of the most brilliant and disturbing levels ever committed to PC.
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