You don't see them on postage stamps the way you find suffragette Susan B. Anthony, but the most important women in science fiction – like Ellen Ripley from Alien, or Dana Scully from The X-Files – are worth celebrating. They're slick. They've got a gun! And, for its first original game since releasing the Silent Hill 2 remake in 2024, developer Bloober is paying homage with its female protagonist the Traveler, a woman of seemingly few words and a high tolerance for disembodied flesh.
Though, Cronos: The New Dawn isn't a political statement – "no feminist agenda here," director Jacek Zięba swears to God while we talk during a recent hands-on event in California. "It's not like we hate ourselves, or males," it's just the simple fact that it's "more interesting to have a female protagonist in some strange suit in a sci-fi setting than to put another male one."
"Nowadays, people tend to invest in political statements," lead writer Grzegorz Like adds, "and sometimes it backfires, because the story doesn't really support the thing." But Like and his writing team wanted to make sure the Traveler's gender "supports the main story and all the many aspects of it."
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"When you start the game, you start with a character that is very cold," Like continues, "but that changes, because the story is about her changing."
Amid piles of ash and decapitated buildings in alternate history '80s Poland, the Traveler is sent on a deadly mission by her secretive employer. She wears a spacesuit as gray and thick as a missile, though it's for exploring time rifts rather than the galaxy, and she quickly becomes accustomed to burning diseased bodies in the name of a debatable greater good.
During my two-hour Cronos demo, I only saw the Traveler as this tightly wound super soldier, but subtle references to topics like self-sacrifice and motherhood make me interested in seeing how she unravels once Cronos releases later this year.
"We wanted to support that feeling of a player being alienated," Like says, "and learning about humanity."
