Hot off the heels of the launch of the hugely successful Silent Hill 2 remake, Polish developer Bloober Team is back with Cronos: The New Dawn.
A sci-fi survival horror mystery that spans both a post-apocalyptic future and a fantastical vision of 1980s Poland on the verge of collapse, it looks like it will play to the studio’s well-established strengths.
The dual setting, threaded together by time travel elements, is particularly reminiscent of the stark contrast between the material world and spirit realm in The Medium, while the apparent focus on exploration and resource management doesn’t seem too far from the tense formula behind the brilliant Silent Hill 2.
Still, as I sit down with Cronos: The New Dawn directors Wojciech Piejko and Jacek Zięba, they’re eager to outline just what sets this upcoming horror game apart.
A new dawn
Bloober Team is split into two primary production teams, one that was recently focused on Silent Hill 2 and another that is creating Cronos. “We were already producing the Silent Hill 2 remake,” explains Piejko. “We [thought we] shouldn’t overlap with the Silent Hill project. So we wanted to go more gameplay heavy, closer to Resident Evil, for example, and make a sci-fi game.”
Zięba adds that the sci-fi focus not only underlines the fact that “this will be farther away from Silent Hill or anything we did before, but [is] also because we want to evolve.” Even so, it’s no coincidence that long-time Bloober fans will recognize some recurring elements as the developers consider Cronos to be something of a culmination of the experience gleaned from past games
“If you think about recent Bloober history, we have Layers of Fear, which was a breakthrough for us as our first horror game, and we learned a lot,” begins Piejko.
“Then with Observer, we expanded the formula by adding dialog choices and a famous actor in Rutger Hauer. Then, with Blair Witch, we introduced our first bigger AI with the dog companion. Then, with The Medium, we switched to a third-person view. Of course, it was a fixed camera, but it allowed us to prepare third-person camera cutscenes and learn.”
“Silent Hill 2 also gave us a backbone for third-person camera gameplay, so when we started our pre-production, we could see how they did it and decide how we want to approach it,” continues Zięba. “Cronos is a combination of everything that we have done as a horror developer, and now we’re starting to be more of a survival horror developer.”
Beyond its own catalogue, the studio is also drawing upon a wide range of influences from across the horror genre. I recognize a few similarities between the design of certain elements in Cronos and the most iconic parts of Dead Space, so I’m interested to find out how much of an impact that title may have had.
“We’re always talking about Resident Evil, because, for us, it was something that inspired Dead Space, for example. A first survival horror game,” replied Piejko.
“When you look at Cronos at first glance, it looks like Dead Space, but maybe not in space. We’ve got the suited protagonist and enemies that are body-horror oriented, but I think that’s where Dead Space ends. I think we are a little bit closer to Resident Evil in terms of gameplay. We bet more on the limited inventory.”
Nine lives
The protagonist’s bulky suit might call to mind the outfit of Dead Space’s Isaac Clarke, but in a unique twist, it looks a lot more like a Victorian diving suit than a futuristic piece of technology.
“We took this old school diver costume, and then we mixed it with a little bit of astronaut, and we also referenced the suits from Alien, which were more bulky,” Piejko explains. “One less obvious inspiration is the onion knights from Dark Souls games, those are really recognizable characters that are kind of bulky and different from the typical soldier type of protagonist.”
Cronos is also distinct from Dead Space and other survival horror titles because of the introduction of time travel mechanics. In the game’s narrative, players are tasked with venturing into a crumbling Polish city in order to rescue key figures from an oncoming apocalypse. “Your goal is to enter the city, look for time rifts, and jump back to the past to extract people who didn’t survive the apocalypse,” Piejko outlines. “Sometimes you may even have to choose who you will extract, maybe you’ll take someone else.”
“Your goal is to enter the city, look for time rifts, and jump back to the past to extract people who didn’t survive the apocalypse”
Wojciech Piejko
“You can also save cats,” he adds, which sounds like an absolutely adorable inclusion. He goes on to underscore the idea that player choice will be an important part of Cronos, as “you can only carry three essences of rescued people at the same time, [leading to situations where] sometimes you have to, for example, erase someone.”
Although few concrete details regarding the plot have been disclosed thus far, Zięba suggests that it is made “a bit more crazy because of time travel” and stresses that “it will not give you all the answers, even after one playthrough.” Those who want the deepest understanding of events will “need to play again and again,” which is something that the team learned “from Silent Hill and FromSoftware games” where “there is a lot of lore, but you need to dig.”
“You are a traveler. You need to extract people from the past, but then with each hour of the game, it narrows down to a more intimate story about the characters and who you are in this world,” says Piejko.
I’m certainly interested to see what’s in store when Cronos: The New Dawn launches for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, and PC later this year.
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dash.wood@futurenet.com (Dashiell Wood)
