Nefarius on 4/7/2005 at 13:58

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I dunno what I should do with them?
I have shoot them with fire arrows, gas, water, and normal arrows, but nothing seems to happen, only they fall on the ground and they start to make some wery... wery... weird noices and Im scared to go near them, when one jumped on my face one time.
Could you tell me, are these zombies/undeads/lunatics/mans or what they are, immortals? Are they "dead" when they fall on the ground? :ebil:

Fish-face on 4/7/2005 at 21:25

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The formula is 2 flashbombs detonating right next to them, or four further away (average of 3 per patient)
I forget how much holy water it takes - 1 or two. 2 fire arrows, or one mine.

EnragedBurrik on 9/7/2005 at 15:35

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When I played this stage and met the ghost I thought "that damn Brother Muriel" all over again.

baeuchlein on 15/7/2005 at 23:47

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This is going to be a long praise to the Cradle's authors, so be prepared for a long read.

I'll join the chorus telling Null that the Cradle mission is not only a great level, but an exciting and good (if one likes such kind of horrors) experience. Since Eric Brosius is said to have done some of the sounds, my applause goes to him as well.

I read something about the Cradle well before buying "Deadly Shadows", yet this influenced my experience in a very good way.

First, there was the Outer Cradle. From reading spoilers some months before, I remembered that it was completely devoid of monsters. I thought "outer cradle" referred to the places outside the building, so I didn't feel safe anymore once I passed the hatch leading to the cellar. The ambient sounds contributed to this; from time to time, there seemed to be new sounds I hadn't heard before - as if I was getting near someone/something.

Then there was this bit about the "puppets". I knew they could not be permanently killed, and were deadly enemies. Sounded like a super-haunt. Long before I met them, I feared they could lurk just around the next corner. I knew I wasn't going to see the staff members for quite a while, thus all the sounds could only have come from a puppet nearby. Much later I understood that those were all ambient sounds.

I did not fear for my own life (although I was quite nervous - well, it was after midnight in the "real world" after all), but for Garrett's. A mission has to have a very good atmosphere to make me feel that way. Few did this; "Trail of blood" from "Thief II" did (especially when I entered the village with the slaughtered pagans and later on when I was walking among those *very* strange "eyeball flowers" in the area with the ape-beasts), the fan mission "Sir Lector comes to Dine" did it, and some parts of "The Inverted Manse" as well.

One thing was strange, however. When I heard the "bumping" (?) from the attic while walking up the stairs to the attic, I was not a bit scared. I just thought, "oh well, there's someone up there knocking at the door, wishing to get out - wait a moment, I'm almost there!" The only thing that really shocked me about Lauryl was the childly shadow emerging from her mist-form. Maybe the fact that I already knew what had happened to her and felt pity for the girl altered my perception of Lauryl.

The fuse in the cellar was something else. I found it and inserted it into the machine... and then I thought, "what if I can't power down this thing again?" Of course I discovered immediately afterwards that I really could not pull the fuse out again. Bad omen.

When I finally arrived near the reception (?) room in the puppet-infested part of the Cradle, my fears grew. From reading spoilers I knew there had to be something very deadly somewhere here, but still I had not seen it. Could not be too far away anymore, could it...?

I was sneaking around the reception when suddenly a puppet entered. I thought it *must* have seen me and ran up the stairs to the observatory. Somewhere on the stairs I halted and looked down. Phew! It wasn't following me, whatever "it" was. After one or two minutes, I silently made my way down the stairs again. Strange, no horrible alien monster here anymore... After searching around the desk and the doorways to adjacent rooms, I thought I'd check out what was at the top end of those stairs. So I sneaked up again. Since the nightmarish being had not passed me anywhere in the reception room, it could not be up here. Right?

So I left the stairs, and - there it was again, slowly advancing onto my position. This time I fled *down* the stairs. Sh*t, how could it have come past me and into the room up there?? Only later I realized that those were two different puppets, so no supernatural teleportation event was involved.

Making my way around the cells up there was very unpleasant (in a positive sense) because I had seen the patrolling puppet there quite early. I now remembered the posting saying that the puppets gave away their position by making the lights flicker. However, this was shortly after the patrolling puppet had left once again and shortly before I arrived at a cell which was, unlike the other ones, still inhabitated. Now the lights *did* flicker. "Yikes", I thought, "it's coming again!" Took me a long time to discover that the one responsible for the flickering was safely locked away in his cell. I hoped I would not need to get something from in there later on. Luckily, I really did not.

Learning more about the "nice" doctors in there did not really make me feel better. On the one hand, I felt pity for the puppets who obviously were those victims of the (still nowhere to be seen) staff. On the other hand, they would certainly rip me into pieces once they found me. I did not know who were the scarier monsters now.

By this time I was already terrified enough to decide that once they got me, I would try to kill them in self-defense. Perhaps half an hour later I came to the first puppet which was in my way: the one crouching at the entrance to a small tunnel. I thought, "it's me or him now", readied the dagger, crouched and silenly approached him. Two or three meters equaled an eternity. I really said, "don't turn... don't turn... just wait..." to myself in a low voice while advancing on the crouching nightmare. When Garrett finally lifted his dagger, I could hardly wait for him to finish, then buried the blade deep into the horror's head. I retracted a few steps quickly and felt relieved then. I didn't feel sorry for the ex-child crumpled on the floor. I committed this kind of murder on many puppets later on because I feared them so much. They were only temporarily taken out, but as long as I kept my distance, they would stay dead.

Things still got scary often enough. I, too, was scared when moving up with the elevator and seeing the hanged being (?) up there. And then this sudden shock when I realized there was no button to get down again...

Later on, I decided to take out the patrolling nightmare near the cells. I threw a mine on the floor, knowing this would alert the being, and went back a short distance, partially hiding behind a corner. The puppet whirled around at the sound of the mine hitting the floor and ran towards me. No problem, he was about to hit the mine any second now. I thought I was perfectly safe now.

But somehow, the mine settled itself near a cell's door, and the killer zombie ran past the explosive, close to the opposite wall. I ran like a madman and escaped somehow.

I waited some time and made my way back to the mine. I shot an arrow at it to make it explode, but missed. I came a bit closer to the mine and... *BANG!* dead Garrett. Well, at least I had not wasted my money for a *defective* mine...

Then there were the staff members. I feared them partially because walking flickering shadows *are* somehow disturbing, partially because I knew I had only a limited number of toys to travel back in time if I was caught, and last but not least because somehow I could not entirely be sure they wouldn't somehow kill me in a horrible way if they got me. You get weird ideas if you're playing hide-and-seek with those puppets for half an hour and more...

And then there was the final problem: How would I get out of that window? Sure, it was open - but there was this table *crowded* with staff members right in front of my exit, and there was abolutely no way of getting around them without being seen.

I decided to jump up and down at one point near the table, thus alerting the staff there. When I was finally sure they all must have seen me (and one of them was already very close to me), I ran around the elevator and entered the room with the table again from the other direction - only to see one of the staff members already returned to his former position. I frantically jumped onto the table and out of the window, hoping he would not get me. He didn't.

The Cradle *definitely* made it's way into my memories - but in a certain way, it wasn't over yet.

In my real life, we had just begun to renovate our house, and two large rooms next to my own were empty except for one high ladder and several tools littering part of the floor. The room has a high ceiling and it's windows are facing south, and it was near full moon that night. No street lamps are on this side of our house; the only light came from the moon, sometimes obscured by one of the few clouds in the sky. The wall-paper in this room had already been removed and the smell of dry dust was everywhere. I went into that room and felt almost as if I was back in the Cradle once again. Very eerie.

Then there was the sound of an animal, but it was *inside* the wall.

There is indeed some space between the inner and outer walls and between the inner wall and the roof as well, and we hear critters in there sometimes. Although I knew that, it did not feel good hearing some rustle inside the wall this time.

And last but not least... The night after I finished the Cradle, I really had a bad dream. I don't exacly remember what it was, but it was about something following me, something not exactly... normal. After I woke up, things went back to normal soon enough, but I have not had such an experience ever before. The Cradle surely had a profound effect on me.

I agree with null: Horror is at its best when it's just felt and nothing else, not when you're walking among bloody dismembered body parts and through pools of blood. The latter is just disgusting; true horror consists of some things you can't see and don't know. You don't even know they're there. You don't even know what *might* be there...

I have played a large part of "Silent Hill 2" (PC version) as well, but the experience is entirely different. "SH2" does not draw me into it's atmosphere, because after playing it for days, I have not really discovered anything that's really important. I still know almost nothing - the player's deceased wife might be still alive (or undead?) in this town, but that's about everything I know. Sure, there is this woman one meets there who resembles the player's wife, and there are some other people, but nothing else of importance. Sure, there are evil mutant horrors roaming the streets and more blood than the entire human race could ever bleed, but it's just disgusting, nothing else. There is no explanation at all, and the only way to find the next place I'm supposed to go to is to go everywhere I can. Passages that I should not use are just too obvious: The house-sized holes in the streets, for example. There's no explanation to the cause of the holes, but to be honest, I am not really interested in any
explanation any more. It's already close to being boring.

That's just my opinion, but somehow I can't imagine why someone could feel about this Silent Hill game in any way similar to what the Cradle makes me feel. The Cradle worked extremely well for me, "SH2" almost never worked for me. Somehowm it's atmosphere does not draw me into the game, not just one millimeter.

When one day I will be able to re-play the Cradle with functioning EAX sound, I guess it might even feel better than the last time.

agrash on 22/7/2005 at 10:34

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lol that would be very funny to see, u freaking out like that :cheeky:
as for me cool lvl the only thing that bothers me is [SPOILER]the puppets, but the staff is allright. I really liked that u travelled (the first time) in the past without any weapons cuz ur in the body of someone else, but its a shame that they didn't showed u the person wich body u took (3rd person vieuw), that would really make it interesting[/SPOILER]