allow the Cradle to remember her. However, after completing this objective, Garrett discovers that the Cradle has remembered him. To escape, the player travels back in time within the Cradle's memory, while fleeing from silhouettes of the Cradle's staff. The player ends the level by leaping from the Cradle's highest window, which convinces the building that Garrett is dead, thus leaving him free. Development The central ideas behind "Robbing the Cradle" were conceived by Thief: Deadly Shadows project director Randy Smith in 2000. Smith had designed a horror-based level, "Return to the Cathedral", in 1998's Thief: The Dark Project. Although he had intended only to make it "atmospheric and suspenseful", the level was widely held to be terrifying. In 2000, Smith was in the process of being hired at Ion Storm to work on Deadly Shadows, and he was contacted by PC Gamer UK writer Kieron Gillen to discuss "Return to the Cathedral". As the interview progressed via email, Smith developed a theory of horror design to retroactively explain the success of the level. His core concept was that players try to establish boundaries between safety and danger, and that fear results when these boundaries become unpredictable, or when the player is compelled to cross them "of their own free will". Smith decided to consciously apply this theory in Deadly Shadows, and the result was "Robbing the Cradle". Smith's goal with "Robbing the Cradle" was to create the scariest level ever to appear in a game, which would "knock 'Return to the Cathedral' off the charts". Designer Jordan Thomas joined the Deadly Shadows team in November 2001, in part because of his interest in horror design. Smith worked with Thomas during the early planning of "Robbing the Cradle", which was referred to at Ion Storm as the "haunted house". Thomas explained that the key to their design was "dread", which he described as the feeling of being "seven steps from the unspeakable". Thomas drafted a level design based on this idea, while seeking to retain the stealth focus of other levels in Deadly Shadows. He saw "Robbing the Cradle" both as a level and as a test of the possibilities of interactive horror design. Smith later noted that his own biggest contributions were the level's beats: he designed ways for players' boundaries to be regularly violated, such as by forcing them to explore threatening areas. Thomas spent a large portion