The lights are off in the Bloober Team offices in Kraków, a heavy rain is pattering against the windows, creating a fitting atmosphere for my time with the studio’s newest horror game, Cronos: The New Dawn. The pressure is on for Bloober who, just last year, competed with some of the best games in the industry after releasing the remake of Silent Hill 2 to worldwide acclaim.
Later, I’ll be sitting in a café in the district of Nowa Huta, an area of Kraków where the game’s environments pull from, as Grzegorz Like, narrative designer on the project, describes the pressure the team feels with Cronos. I asked him what that stress was like, and he grimaced while laughing, before saying, “For sure, there’s a lot of pressure and expectation, but we know we’ve given it our all.” He knows this is another chance to shine.
For now, he’s laughing and joking, reacting to everything in the game as if he’s a new player and hasn’t run through it for an accumulated 600 hours, playtesting every scenario. Though, he notes, a playthrough only takes around 20 hours.
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Cronos opens with the Traveler landing in a decimated version of Kraków, wearing a hazard suit seemingly made of the toughest metals, shrouded from this world that is fractured in time. The goal is to discover what happened to civilisation and enter different time periods, investigating the ruins of the city, all while avoiding the monsters that roam the streets - twisted versions of humans who can merge with the dead to enhance their abilities.
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With Cronos, the first word that came to mind was ‘familiar,’ anyone who has played any survival horror game in the past 10 years, and particularly fans of the recent Silent Hill 2 remake, will instantly feel at home. The game feels exactly as you’d think, and the mechanics will feel like second nature, including genre tropes like using stashes and managing inventory space.
That doesn’t mean you’ll know what to expect; the world of Cronos is heavily shrouded in mystery, and it’s bewildering to the player. If you played Returnal by Housemarque, you’ll feel the same confusion in this tale, where surreal meets intrigue.
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However, in Cronos, you are playing as someone who is familiar with this world, has confidence in their abilities, but you’re not part of the conversation. The disorientation of discovering fragments of lore feels like the best mysteries, and for the first time in the six hours I spent with Bloober Team, Twin Peaks is mentioned - a clear inspiration in how to tell stories. The mystery is utterly engaging from the off, and when this playthrough ended after a couple of hours, I found myself constantly thinking about the possibilities of the plot.
While the building blocks are so heavily inspired by so much that has come before, Bloober Team is doing what it can to put its stamp on the genre, as it knows all too well that so much has been achieved by others.
For example, while a series like Resident Evil would give you thrills through adventure, Cronos has a more sombre tone; something like Silent Hill puts you in the shoes of an inexperienced survivor, while here you’re fully equipped to deal with the horrors of the world from the moment you land, seeking out the body of your predecessor - a fallen Traveler who stepped back in time to seek answers, and now you must venture forth instead.
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There are inevitable comparisons to be made, the team isn’t shocked at hearing that viewers of the trailer are seeing a lot of Dead Space in the Traveler and their suit, but one thing is clear, this is very much a Bloober Team game, and for a studio that has become known for their spin on other successes, Cronos is very personal game that focuses on what the team does best: immersive horror.
It’s personal in that it takes place in Poland, in an area inspired by Nowa Huta, a district only a 10-minute Uber ride down the road. It’s where narrative designer Grzegorz Like has lived all his life, and in the opening moments of the game, as the world unravels around the Traveler and we step into the central square of this desolate city, he points out where his grandma lives.
There’s so much of the team in here, from the iconic household items they grew up with to subtle Easter eggs. Entering a house, there’s a photo on the wall that we linger on. Here, Klaudia Sewera, producer of the game, points out it’s an image of her father, the man who introduced her to gaming at a young age. This is a place that is so iconically Polish, and the team has worked with local museums, scanning vintage household items into the game to keep an integral authenticity.
Of course, this is an alternate version of Poland, one torn apart by… something. And that something has ripped through civilisation, warping humanity, and creating Orphans, creatures that have mangled bodies, elongated limbs, and grotesque gaping mouths. They stagger about the area looking to rend and kill, but the hook here is that they can evolve as you play, in real-time, by merging with other fallen creatures.
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Only fire or violence can stop them from merging, and it’s apparent that if you don’t focus on immediate threats, you’re going to have a bad time. While some of these Orphans are naked as the day they were born and only rip and tear with clawed hands, others are armoured, or spit acid. Killing a spitter and letting an armoured Orphan merge with it creates a monstrosity that not only takes longer to kill, but can now spit acid at you from range.
The panic that sets in when you can’t halt a merging is palpable and, in some situations, letting these creatures combine can create an enemy that feels like a mini-boss. Here, fire is your friend, stopping merging, but it’s a limited resource, much like ammo and healing items, though these can be crafted on the fly from materials scattered around. Fire has many uses, and running out feels like a death sentence. Thankfully, there are handy explosive canisters strewn around, coming in clutch during hectic fights.
The fear here comes from a sense of panic, rather than foreboding, though there are plenty of moments that will either have you watching through squinted eyes or jumping at shadows. While the traversal through each area feels suitably slow, creating tension, the fights often have a frenetic feel to them with Orphans hemming you in, swarming you when given the chance.
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Thankfully, you have a steadily growing arsenal of weapons, though I only got to see the basic pistol and shotgun in my time with the game. Each weapon comes with two firing options, so the pistol, for example, can rapidly fire to stagger the enemy or be charged for a more powerful, but ultimately slower, piercing shot. Switching on the fly feels great and a lovely animation materialises each gun into your hands, as rather than collecting separate weapons, new guns augment your starting pistol.
There are plenty of upgrades, too. Collecting ‘cores’ allows for improvements to suit abilities, or carrying capacity, while collecting energy, a kind of currency, will level up your weapons for better fire rates or increased damage. It may sound like ‘by the books’ design, but Bloober Team doesn’t want to mess with what works, instead simply expanding on what’s come before and giving the genre something new in concept and execution.
Cronos is filled with moments of flair; haunting spaces littered with the detritus of human lives; beams of light breaking through windows and catching swirling dust motes; glossy gore exploding from limbs to arc through the air; floating objects spinning away in zero-gravity pockets where time ceases; a gorgeous corona of light around the charging pistol muzzle; architecture pulled from the real world, forming a neighbourhood that feels lived in.
What players will find in Cronos is a wonderfully created world that begs to be explored, and a central protagonist who goes on a journey in more ways than one. The Traveler starts off as a very stoic, mission-focused person who feels almost robotic, delivering dialogue in a careless monotone. It’s only as the story begins to unfold we get more emotion, they see the world for what it is, and what it once was, bringing forward new emotions. The clipped speech feels abrasive at first but, of course, they're no-nonsense. It’s only when they start meeting neighbourhood cats - all named after cats kept by the studio’s staff - that the facade cracks and humanity shows. It’s then much later, after I’ve left the studio, that I realise they feel like the Terminator, starting the story as a cog in a machine, slowly becoming something much more human.
By the end of my time with Cronos: The New Dawn, not only was I impressed by everything I saw, but I felt hungry to know more about this world and the tragedy that befell it. As any good mystery should, it laid the breadcrumbs and all I wanted was more, to find out everything about this apocalypse, how the time-travel works - and what, if anything, can be saved. The stakes feel much higher than in other survival horrors, because it’s not one life on the line, but also because the disaster has already happened. We’re working retroactively to save the day, which makes Cronos feel like a breath of fresh air, while being constructed on familiar building blocks.
Topics: Features, Preview, Silent Hill, Resident Evil, Dead Space