Achievements, voices off, Noir and Retro, and a closer look at Block D

This is a big one. Most of it is about how you experience The Cradle: hearing it, reading it, seeing it. And for the first time, there’s something to hunt for. A lot of it comes straight from your feedback. Thank you!

🏆 Achievements

The Cradle now has 16 achievements, in the main menu and the pause menu. Find every name tag, reach all three endings, read everything that was left behind… and 5 of them are hidden. You’ll only find out what they are when you earn them.

• Progress shows as you go, like “4 / 11” for the name tags.
• Unlocks appear as a small, quiet card in the corner, and it waits until a scene is over, so it never breaks a tense moment.
• Already played? You may have a few unlocked already. They’ve been tracked all along.

🎞 Noir and Retro filters

You’ve seen the black-and-white screenshots on this page. Now you can play the game that way. Settings → Video → Filter → Noir gives you a cold, high-contrast black-and-white picture with grain and a soft glow around the lights. Strong reds stay red. Retro turns it into a PS1-era picture: low resolution, chunky dithering. Switch any time, even mid-game.

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🛏 Block D, up close

The ward’s beds used to have plain grey boxes for mattresses. Now there are real ones: striped Soviet ticking, sagging middles and rust stains from the springs. There are also proper pillows and grey wool blankets, and no two beds look quite the same.

The notes got the same treatment. The page you pick up from the floor now shows its actual handwriting, and so do Valya’s notes on her desk. The duty room board has real pinned sheets: a roster, a phone list, a note.

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🎵 The Lullaby ending, retimed

In the Mila’s reel ending, the camera used to wait on an empty doorway for several seconds. Now the scene fades to black as the last child leaves. The music stays in time, and the return to the transmitter hall is quieter: just a heartbeat.

📊 Optional, anonymous statistics

On first launch, the game now asks whether you’d like to share anonymous play statistics: how far players get, which endings they find, and how the game runs on different devices. It’s off unless you say yes, never includes anything personal, and can be changed any time in Settings → Interface. It helps a solo developer see where the game works and where it doesn’t.

🔇 Voiceover is now optional

Some of you told me you’d rather not hear AI voices. Fair! There’s now a Voiceover switch in Settings → Audio. Turn it off, and every spoken line becomes subtitles only, while all the sound effects stay.

I didn’t want “voices off” to feel like the game froze, so a few things change with it:

• Lines keep their timing. Each subtitle stays up exactly as long as the voice would have spoken, so no scene rushes by.
• You still hear where a voice comes from. Gromov’s lines come with quiet radio static, the phone line hisses, tapes have their hiss, and people in the room get a soft breath or murmur. All of it is generated sound, not voices.
• Subtitles are easier to catch: coloured speaker names, a small animated icon for radio, phone or tape, text that types in as it’s “spoken”, and a darker, slightly bigger plate. Each of these can be switched on or off in Settings → Interface.

📜 A dialogue log

Missed a line? The pause menu now has Диалоги / Dialogue, with the last 50 lines and who said them.

💬 We have a Discord!

There’s now a Discord icon in the corner of the title screen. Join to follow updates, report bugs, share your achievement hunts and get exclusive announcements first: https://discord.gg/ufYtrP3NRk

One more thing

The Cradle is now made under a studio name: Encrypted Cat Games, with me, 0xKOT, as its solo developer. The end credits got a rewrite to match.

Thanks for playing, and for every comment, bug report and stream. See you in the dark. 🕯