There is an excellent feature from the March
2005 edition of PC Gamer, written by Kieron Gillen, that analyzes thoroughly “Robbing
the Cradle”, and includes an interview with the mission’s designer, Jordan
Thomas. I include highlights from the feature and the interview below, with
some of my commentary. I also include the full feature article at the end of
the post, which I encourage you to read.
Note:
the page numbers are, first, the page number from this issue of PC Gamer, and,
second, the page number from the PDF document.
On the ‘Cradle’ and immersion:
“If The
Cradle is about anything, it’s immersion. Your head pushed beneath murky
waters until you choke and drown. The
Cradle is the penultimate level in last year’s Thief: Deadly Shadows. 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. 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 probably the scariest level
ever made, an experiment in non-linear storytelling methods that pays off
handsomely and is one of the towering gaming achievements of the past year.”
(133, 2)
As
of 2005, Robbing the Cradle probably was the best horror experience in gaming.
But now, we have Rose Cottage. Hmm: tough choice!
On the starting angle, and one of the
themes of the Cradle:
“The starting view is angled so that
you’re looking up and it’s looming over you like a furious parent about to discipline
a child. In this first moment, The Cradle’s themes are set – the relationship
between those with power and those without, authority and the oppressed. The
level’s genius is that it never explicitly states its purpose. The truth is
only approached tangentially, in the non-linear method of storytelling entirely
unique to games. That is, through immersion. The level doesn’t tell you a
story. It gives you clues, and you tell the story to yourself. It’s this
process of realisation that provides some of the most disturbing moments in The
Cradle. You’re told from the start that it used to be a madhouse. You’re told
that before that it was an orphanage. 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.” (133, 2)
This
part notes a design principle of Thief I’ve touched on throughout all of this
blog: Thief’s method of subtlety feeding the player a story through clues, or
narrative caches.
On the audio:
“Sound-man Eric Brosius? He’d have been
burned as a witch. 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. Mostly a drunken miasma of sound is smeared across your speakers, making
you uneasy until an unexpected noise splits asunder. Distant sounds rise up,
suggesting the scuttling of unknown things moving elsewhere, up to no good.
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. The flickering of lights wouldn’t
be the same without the tiny crackle. 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.” (133, 2)
On the Puppets:
“Take the Cradle’s inhabitants – the
puppets, whose movements are carefully judged to appear unnatural. They don’t
move like people. They move as if their insides are about to split or their
bones have been broken and set at off-angles. The art here is to not be wrong
(as in not correct) but Wrong (as in so close to being normal... but not
quite). 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... 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.” (133, 2; through 134, 3)
The
movement of the Puppets is what makes them a particularly memorable undead.
Their jerks and spasms, while otherwise moving like normal people, put them in
a class of horror above the shambling of zombies.
On the AI-less Outer Cradle:
“The masterstroke is that the first half
of the level is empty. Nothing’s there, so you spend almost the first half of
the visit inching around darkened corridors, trying to work out what went wrong
while jumping at shadows. You hate the darkness, as you know it could be
concealing anything. And then, once you’ve reactivated the generators, complete
with the sort of rattling mechanical scream that you just know will have
alerted anything with something vaguely analogous to ears within a square mile,
the electric lights twitch back into life and you’d do anything to have a good
darkened alcove to crouch in again. Masterful psychology: make you hate one
thing, then take it away in a way which makes you wish for its speedy return.”
(134, 3)
Come
to think of it, would you ever want to turn all the power on in an old,
abandoned, haunted house? The juxtaposition of light with fear is masterful
psychology. Kieron Gillen puts it excellently here.
On the Cradle’s memories:
“Ah. The Cradle’s memories. It’s by this
point you’ve realised that Shalebridge isn’t made of bricks and mortar, but
something more. The years of brutality and institutionalised torture sublimed
into some shapeless intelligence that wants nothing better than to keep you
here forever. While you simply view the place as a building at first, by the
time you leave it’s clearly an adversary – its personality expressed in the
world you’ve fearfully sneaked your way through. It never speaks directly to
you. There’s none of the obvious taunting of an entity like SHODAN in System Shock 2, but when your every
action is thwarted it’s painfully obvious that something wants to keep you, in
the way a stomach keeps a snack.” (136, 5)
This
is what sets the Cradle apart from other horror mission in the world of Thief,
including Rose Cottage. The Cradle is made to be a living entity, taunting you.
-The history of the Cradle, before it was
ruined, is never explicitly laid out. Below, Kieron Gillen gives an excellent
description of how it might have gone, putting together all the narrative
pieces that the player may find in the mission:
“…even in the City, no-one loiters too
long in the shadow of one particular building, which hangs off the east side of
the Old Quarter like some facial canker. Shalebridge Cradle.
…
The Cradle doesn’t have history. It has a
scream, stretched out through time. It’s said Shalebridge used to be that sad
institute for lost children: an orphanage. It’s also said that it was that sad
institution for lost adults: an asylum. What most don’t realise is that, during
its latter days, it was both at once. While safer in-mates were kept in the
pauper’s ward towards the front of the building, the murderously insane – of
which, at The Cradle’s demise, there were nine – were kept in the White Hall
ward, towards the rear, with heavy metal, lock-down doors between them and
civilisation. Near them, the orphans, high in the Nursery tower. At the
building’s heart, looking over all, was the Staff Tower, the stronghold of the
lawmakers. Children and the insane, under the lock and key of nurses and
doctors. Authority and oppression, bound together.” (138, 7)
(On when it caught on fire):
“Flames swept up. The Nursery tower joined
its sister in misery. The voices of boys and girls merged in an unholy choir, a
shriek to empty skies. The smoke arose to the heavens, blacking them out,
forming a cloud of the remains of authority. Anything elevated was destroyed.
All that remained was the base material. The tortured voices were The Cradle’s
birthing cry. The rising smoke was its first breath. Born of torture,
oppression, authority, murder and a history of weeping, the place was alive.
…
It wasn’t the end. The inmates rose from
death, becoming puppets of The Cradle’s will and twitching in meaningless
echoes of their past existence. The bodies animated in a closed, spasming loop
for fifty years, waiting for someone else to enter, to catch The Cradle’s
attention, and so join its eternal, macabre dance. They say its doors will open
before you. They’ll seal behind you. And as long as you’re alive, it’ll never
let you leave.” (139, 8)
Below, I pull highlights from the
interview with the designer of “Robbing the Cradle”, Jordan Thomas. I comment
on it as well, as some of Thomas’ design points echo what I’ve been getting at throughout
this project (except he was saying this stuff ten years ago! I think it speaks
to the universality of recognizing Thief’s
design that I had not read this interview prior to doing this project):
PCG:
Where did the conceit of The Cradle come from?
A:
The Thief games are – in the abstract
– largely about exploring unfamiliar, hostile spaces. It seemed an elegant sort
of conceit to take that concept literally, and simply feed Garrett (the
ultimate trespasser) to a vast building which harbours a sort of monstrous
sentience, along with a perverse appetite. We knew that our ‘haunted house’
(the internal title) would be one of the latter entries in the story arc, and
that it would pit the player against the undead, in some form.
[…]
We
quickly concluded that our core objective was to devise the single most
terrifying first-person game experience ever constructed.
I love the answer Thomas
gave above. Note his analysis of Thief games as “exploring unfamiliar, hostile
spaces.” This is one of the key points I’ve stressed in this project, such as
when I argued that Thief’s ‘atmosphere of intimidation’ makes for more
effective narrative conveyance. This is also why I think Thief is prime
foundation for haunted-house experiences.
PCG:
So what do you actually count as terror?
A:
In terms of the aforementioned terror, we weren’t bent on eliciting constant
panic, per se. Our point-of-origin was the word ‘dread’. I like to define it as
that quintessential ‘threshold’ sensation which whispers rather than shouts,
warning you that you’re seven steps from the unspeakable.
PCG:
Where do you think horror in games goes wrong?
A:
We’ve got a deficit there, and it’s far from exclusive to gaming; horror in
general tends to ooze along the path of least resistance. Think back – in your
entire life, how many movies have drawn you in deeply enough to make your guts
go cold in genuine fright? They probably number less than ten, if you’re
reasonably hardy. With games, I suspect you could count them on one hand.
Here, Thomas has singled
out ‘dread’ as the feeling he goes for most in horror, rather than fright.
PCG:
[…]So how do [read: did] you think of The Cradle?
A:
[…]
The
intent was to frighten, disturb, thrill, or startle as wide an audience as
possible within the parameters I’d been given. And, if possible, to leave a few
of those ‘scars’. The jaded user would, hopefully, appreciate the grim
narrative and physical tension. The highly imaginative or impressionable
players would find themselves inching along through a simulated nightmare,
trying not to breathe. And, of course, I hoped to execute all of this without
sacrificing the key intrinsic strengths of Thief gameplay. Stealth is
inherently conducive to a feeling of vulnerability, but typically not quite
this pronounced. The Cradle was, all in all, a holistic effort in game horror
and stealth level design, intended to communicate the feeling of dread in
several complementary languages.
This goes along with my
earlier point that Thief’s stealth gameplay is used to enhance the game’s
atmosphere and narrative qualities, and not just so players can ‘play a stealth
game’.
PCG:
So – what rewards do a more holistic approach give the developer?
A:
The expected reward for this (rather fastidious) series of trials can be summed
up by one word: ‘resonance’. All of The Cradle’s actors, from the
malfunctioning lights to the shambling undead themselves are tied into a
central choreographer object. It’s a kind of invisible ‘puppet master’ that
tells them how to behave in the real world, and in the world beyond (which is
comprised of the asylum’s fragmented dreams of its former days).
[…]
PCG:
All fiction’s reliant on a leap of faith in that way, really.
[…]
A:
Because, in that tiny microcosm of supported behaviour choices (say, stalking
through an abandoned building and trying not to die), the network of simulated
possibilities is dense enough that you cease poking holes in the world-fabric,
and begin actively filling them yourself! Your imagination becomes inextricably
intertwined with the content you’re consuming, and you become a partial
architect of your own reactions. The game is then far more likely to resonate
with you, carving out a permanent niche among your long-term memories. And
that, of course, is the honour for which we developers strive.
What he said.
[…]
-And,
for some fun side-info:
PCG:
How much reference work did you make when preparing The Cradle?
A:
The Cradle is the synthetic offspring of dozens of actual, existing Victorian
hospitals and reputedly haunted buildings. All the misery, malpractice and
dementia that have been ascribed to those places are seen here through a
proportionally exaggerated lens. I read reams of patient and staff interviews,
scoured countless articles on historical mental-health treatment practises,
compiled a huge reference archive of photographs taken by urban explorers who
regularly break into abandoned asylums, and even visited a few locations
myself.
PCG:
Any particular incidents stuck in your memory from your research?
A:
One story involved a patient who managed to escape into the storage wings of
the asylum, and because of her eroded state-of-mind, she became lost and
succumbed to starvation. The place was such a teeming ‘snake pit’ that she
wasn’t missed, and the stain from her body seeped permanently into the wood.
Another involved a man who was committed as a toddler. Decades later, when
asked to sign his own name, he drew a rough silhouette of the hospital. The
place was so omnipresent and dominant a force in his life that it eclipsed his
identity. The Cradle was built out of that sort of cheery material.
PCG:
And, finally, what fictional influences shaped The Cradle?
A:
Among the films that helped inspire it were Jacob’s Ladder, Session 9, and The
Devil’s Backbone. Books included From Hell, House of Leaves, and The Shining.
My game influences are innumerable, but two most prominent were the Silent Hill
series and the System Shock series, to which The Cradle owes a great deal.
(140-141,
9-10)
PC
Gamer, March 2005 issue
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