Sat in a San Francisco hotel room with the lights off and the curtains closed watching a hands-off demo of Bloober’s survival horror Cronos: The New Dawn, it’s clear the Polish horror developer has newfound confidence after the success of its Silent Hill 2 remake.
Cronos has been developed by a different internal team than Silent Hill 2, but the survival horror experience has rubbed off positively as the development team tackle an original take on the genre. The game was announced in October last year when I spoke with the game’s co-directors about following in Konami’s footsteps. Then at last month’s Game Developer Conference – sat, appropriately, in the dark – I was able to see Cronos in action ahead of its new gameplay trailer released yesterday.
What followed was the culmination of all Bloober has achieved. Cronos combines the psychological horror the studio is known for, with the survival horror of Silent Hill and, most intriguingly, an authentic Polish setting that together feels like a natural evolution for the team.
Cronos features a dirty, grounded take on sci-fi set in an alternate history where an apocalyptic event took place in 1980s Krakow. Players take on the role of a mysterious traveller in a metallic suit sent back in time to explore the ruins of human civilisation. Along the way they piece together not only what happened to humanity, but previous travellers who failed in their mission by discovering journals left behind to decipher the mystery.
It’s a narrative setup that’s ripe for the sort of psychological intrigue Bloober does best. Yet in gameplay terms, it initially seemed somewhat derivative. Cronos has all the typical hallmarks of the modern survival horror genre: limited ammo, an over-the-shoulder view, inventory management and crafting, yellow crates to bust open, and finding the right key for the right lock. It’s all stuff you’ve done before in Resident Evil 4, Dead Space and – of course – Silent Hill 2. It even has a waveform graph to visualise your health.
The preview took place in an area inspired by Krakow’s Nowa Huta, or New Steelworks. Think brutalist architecture but stuck in explosive stasis, as bricks and metallic shards and steel bars extend outwards like wounded beasts. There will be puzzles in these environments, involving finding cores to revert time anomalies, with a simple early example resulting in a pathway shortcut. Though not open world, the city will be fully explorable as a series of distinct sectors that always return to a central hub. There won’t be a map either, as players gradually explore the unknown and focus more on learning the environment than a menu screen. It gives the team more freedom in surreal level design too, resulting in maze-like buildings of multiple layers too complex to contain within a map.
Cronos is far more combat-focused than Bloober’s previous games, more so than Silent Hill 2. The traveller has both melee abilities and a selection of guns, including a pistol with piercing shots and a hefty shotgun with a wide charged blast. Yet when I spoke to the co-directors last year, they hinted at a unique combat mechanic along the lines of Dead Space’s limb shooting or Alan Wake’s flashlight but wouldn’t provide details. Now I’ve seen combat will revolve around merging enemies.
Enemies are mutated humanoids, as Bloober delves into gruesome body horror – all writhing tentacles and squelching, bulbous growths spitting luminous acid. Yet if players don’t dispose of enemies properly during combat, others will be able to merge with the undead corpses, morphing multiple times into increasingly hardened versions with new abilities. Standard enemies become elite monstrosities with newfound ranged attacks or armour, for instance. I mentioned this reminded me of the Crimson Head enemies from Capcom’s Resident Evil remake on the GameCube – where regular zombies can revive as deadly, door-knocking horrors – and the pair admitted this was a key influence.
Disposing of enemies means attacking with fire. The traveller has a Dead Space-esque melee stomp with flame capabilities, as well as a flamethrower weapon and more fiery exploits. Yet ammo is limited and these abilities can also be used for further exploration by burning down blockages – a choice reminiscent of the shivs in The Last of Us, with players deciding between defence or new discoveries. What’s more, while singular enemies will be easy enough to defeat, herds will prove deadly as enemies merge with others in the midst of combat if players don’t manage encounters (and their ammo) appropriately. It’s here that Bloober is going for the sort of intense, breathless experience of Resident Evil 4, rather than cheap jump scares.
And as for collectibles, Bloober won’t just let you pet the in-game cats – these form the main side quest in the game and are modelled after the team’s actual pets.
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Much of the preview involved finding a key for a lock, in this case a set of bolt cutters to slice away the entrance to a lift in a decrepit building. Inside was a base set up by a previous traveller, featuring the typical magic inventory box and save station. Atop the building was a pulsing time anomaly, though not before a tense boss fight through a half-collapsed apartment that required well-timed shots and use of fire.
Initially, then, Cronos seemed all too familiar, but the more I watched the more I was enthralled by its own mysteries. The focus on combat has allowed Bloober to flex its muscles, while the merging mechanic has opportunity for some genuinely terrifying encounters. But it’s the setting that’s really grabbed me. What are these time anomalies? What happened to the previous travellers? And who exactly is the person in the suit?
Really, Cronos feels like a parallel for Bloober itself as it merges its past experience into a stronger future, while the Krakowian setting ensures the game transcends obvious inspirations into something fresh that feels authentically Polish. Weeks later, its atmospheric post-apocalyptic streets still haunt me.
