After the success of Silent Hill 2 Remake, Bloober Team is embracing the freedom of creating a game from whole cloth and treating itself with Resident Evil-like action horror, Polish influences, and cats in its new sci-fi horror game Cronos: The New Dawn. Hell yeah.
Bloober Team has been candid about its intent to make Cronos: The New Dawn lean into action horror as opposed to the slow, creeping psychological horror that defines Silent Hill 2. Cronos co-director Wojciech Piejko told GamesRadar+ in April that the game "is more Resident Evil-ish" than Silent Hill-ish, despite its "deep psychological story."
Now, in an interview with PC Gamer, lead writer Grzegorz Like draws an even thicker line between Silent Hill 2 and Cronos: The New Dawn, although he still admits (as director Jacek Zięba told GamesRadar+ in July) "Silent Hill is in every one of our games, because this is what moulded us as creators."
"We knew that this needed to be different," Like said. "No more James Sunderland, running around the place with his wooden plank, this needed to be something else. We are not only horror fans, but we love everything sci-fi and 80s. So we decided, okay, let's treat ourselves. Let's make it us. Put Poland in it, the badass suit, time travel. What do you want? What do you like? Someone said cats? Okay, let's do cats."
I'm all about game developers, and creators more generally, leaning into their identity and making something deeply personal – and cats help – but for my money, Bloober has yet to really prove itself as a real force in horror with an original title. Especially with most of its pre-Silent Hill 2 games being light on the gameplay, it remains to be seen what a full-blown, action-horror Bloober Team game looks like.
Of course, Bloober Team is also actively developing a remake of Silent Hill 1, which for me is a much more guaranteed win because the studio's already proven itself in the remake arena with Silent Hill 2.
Cronos: The New Dawn puts you in the shoes of the Traveler, navigating the post-apocalyptic Kraków district Nowa Huta, which has been ravaged by a virus called the Change that turns humans into zombie-like monsters. As a traveler, your job is to comb through the remains of civilization and use time rifts to go back in time and extract victims of the Change in hopes of giving them a new chance for survival.
It's out on PS5, Xbox Series X, Switch 2, and PC on September 5, with a 48-hour early access window for Deluxe Edition adopters.
