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Gummy piles of monster flesh, a skinny Christmas tree, burnt-out buildings, frozen in time – this is not an antisocial shopping list, but the broken heart pieces a new trailer reveals of retrofuturist Bloober game Cronos: The New Dawn.
The gameplay preview suggests sci-fi Cronos could be the Dead Space of my unpleasant dreams, rooted in familiar humanity rather than the iconic 2008 survival shooter's more clinical, dull metal spaceship. But instead of letting its horror unfold in a sterile environment, Cronos seems to let it mingle with reality.
Sure, there are earthworm-colored aliens – which apparently have the ability to merge their skin with one another as if made from chewing gum, "turning every encounter into a mind-bending nightmare and a struggle for survival," PR says. But Cronos' time-traveling protagonist also wanders through empty apartments, over winding cobblestone streets in a deadly Polish winter.
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This more anxious approach to horror – taking recognizable, comforting scenes and coating them in plague – reminds me of the surreal Silent Hill 2 remake; it seems that Bloober has learned a lesson in psychological subtlety, showing fearsomeness rather than instructing you to be afraid, as its 2016 game Layers of Fear did.
Cronos: The New Dawn also looks like it'll be much more proactive than that game, which players have sometimes derisively dismissed as a walking simulator. The Traveler, encased in their clunky gray spacesuit, apparently gets to twirl around during zero-gravity jumps and whack monsters with many kinds of explosives, contributing to the dusty wind that surrounds them.
"Bring them back," the gameplay trailer instructs in big red letters about what PR describes as a group of "enigmatic characters" – all human. Will see what's left of them when Cronos: The New Dawn releases some time this year.
Travel through time rifts to search for survivors in sci-fi survival horror Cronos: The New Dawn.
