Grossest game of the year doubles as the most kitty friendly, as you can pet real-life cats amid alien gore: "There was like a casting for cats"

Cronos: The New Dawn – the first original horror IP developer Bloober is working on after its Silent Hill 2 remake – is a rancid reimagining of Soviet-era Poland, and sweet kitties apparently love feasting on the monstrous flesh it's littered with.

Or something like that, based on what Cronos co-director Wojciech Piejko told GamesRadar+ during a recent interview at GDC 2025.

"We've got cats in the game; you can pet them," Piejko said about Cronos, what so far seems to be a retrofuturist Dead Space starring a masked time traveler. "They are serving as collectibles."

I'd say that collectible, fluffy cats are a tonal contrast to the pale, writhing, tentacled alien skin a new gameplay trailer reveals you'll need to keep from merging into one, big, multi-limbed enemy sack… but, you know, I bet cats at the end of time would eat anything.

And here's another cute detail: "all the cats are based on the real cats that belong to our crew," Piejko said. "There was like a casting for cats – people were sending photos and names."

I'm sure the opportunity to be featured in Cronos spread like sandy kitty litter among the cat community; our feline friends have likely been looking for a PR reset ever since the Cats movie suggested them to be unfeeling, gluttonous space creatures in 2019.

Obviously, they're actually unfeeling, Eastern European angels – a categorization I, since my mother's from Bulgaria, can empathize with. It's a tough job, being an angel on Earth. It requires a lot of lounging in the sun and running after laser pointers, and sometimes, there just aren't enough hours in the day.

But someone's gotta do it. And it sounds like Cronos' cats do it with a smile – or, uh, a meow – as Piejko said they "add something like a mild comedy, let's say, and the human touch to our character."

Can you imagine it? Cats humanizing people, and people popping bullets into monster torsos. It's practically paradise.

Cronos: The New Dawn co-directors talk merging abominations, Resident Evil, Dark Souls, and Netflix's Dark of all things: "We've got a deep psychological story to tell."