The folks at Bloober Team have been somewhat quietly making a name for themselves in the gaming world, with originals like Medium and the surprisingly great Blair Witch video game under their belt. But the developer took a major step up last year with the release of the smash hit Silent Hill 2 remake. So, what’s next for the company? Something bold. Something fresh. Something totally new. That something is Cronos: The New Dawn.
“People like this, but they want something new, something original, something just different to play,” said Jacek Zieba, the game’s co-director in a recent interview with Fango. “Everybody is stuffed with remakes, etc., even if you love them. I feel like now it’s a good moment for new ideas.”
“None of us was working on Silent Hill 2,” Zieba clarified right up top. After “proving people wrong” regarding the company’s success with the much-acclaimed Konami remake, all eyes are now on launching an original game. “It’s a big challenge because whatever we do after Silent Hill, people are waiting for.”
“We bet more on a different kind of action, different kinds of puzzles, this sci-fi vibe and brutalist architecture,” said Wojciech Piejko, the other co-director of Cronos. “Everything that will make the game different, to still be an awesome survival/horror game, but different from Silent Hill.”
“It’s bonkers,” Piejko adds of the game’s story. But how did they cook up this bonkers story? After Bloober Team wrapped up The Medium, they were divided into teams to craft pitches for a new game. Two pitches came from that exercise. One pitch was described as close to John Carpenter’s The Thing. “The other team came up with the idea of a traveler that jumps back in time to extract people,” Piejko explained. “We took the best things from both of these pitches.”
After much refining, the result is Cronos: The New Dawn. Due out later this year, it is a brutal third-person survival horror where players fight for the future by salvaging the past. Burn monsters before they merge. Extract souls from the living. The name of the game? Adapt or die. In addition to our chat with the team behind the game, we’ve also got two exclusive screenshots from the game for you to check out above.
As far as influences go, Zieba mentioned the Resident Evil series, specifically some of the recent remakes. He cited Resident Evil 2 as a “gold standard” for the survival/horror genre. Dead Space, Death Stranding and Bloodborne were also cited. Movies such as The Thing, Annihilation and 12 Monkeys were name-checked. “The further we got into production, we saw and felt we’re going in our own direction on the arms of other giants,” Zieba said.
It also didn’t hurt that the core team were all aligned as far as broader pop cultural influences are concerned. “Everyone loves Alien here,” Grzegorz Like, the game’s lead writer said. “So let’s do something about it.”
The game is set in a grim world where Eastern European brutalism meets retro-futurist technology, which lets players experience a bizarre story that straddles the line between past and future. That architecture was all inspired by a very real place, namely the Howa Huta district in Poland, which is very much true to Bloober Team’s roots, given that the company is based in Poland.
“Nowa Huta, the whole district, is quite unique for Poland,” Anna Martseniuk, a 3D environment artist for Cronos, said. “It actually exists and it was quite easy to take what’s unique that we already have in Krakow and place it over our game.”
Nowa Huta was built in the ‘50s by the Soviets when Poland was largely under Soviet control. “The whole district is full of brutalist architecture and it was built around Huta, which means steelworks,” Like said. “It was like this Communist dream.” Communist dreams, with history as our guide, often turn into nightmares.
“I think it’s very unique and very interesting for all people to see, to feel the vibe,” Martseniuk said. “People had a lot of dreams to build the perfect city,” Martseniuk further explained. “Designers tried to make the perfect place to live, to work, to spend your free time. Nowa Huta is a very people oriented place.”
“It’s very different from anything out there, in a way,” Zieba said. “The whole game, in the case of environment, is in Polish. So, if you’re not from Poland or you don’t know the language you will feel like, ‘Okay, what the fuck? What does it mean?’” He also made it clear that they do translate everything, but it just bumps up the “weirdness.”
While the game is shrouded in this odd veil of mystery, the trailers (such as the one above) offer some serious Dead Space vibes. It’s also not hard to see where those The Thing comparisons are coming from, given some of the creature designs. It’s, all at once, something that looks very original, while remixing a great many familiar elements from popular survival/horror games of the past.
“At the surface, Cronos plays like a classic survival/horror,” Piejko said of the actual gameplay experience. “But we’ve got more in the game than meets the eye at the very beginning.” There is a very unique combat system and players will have to be tactical in how they approach the action. “When you need to think who to drop, maybe not drop. To burn the body or not. To use your precious resources,” Piejko added.
Silent Hill 2 is one of the most beloved horror games of all time. The fact that Bloober Team did such a phenomenal job with the remake helped buy them a lot of good will with the gaming community. What’s refreshing is that the company is looking to build on that reputation with a new idea, rather than taking another stab at something that already exists.
“We feel like, ‘Okay, we are just in the right moment to release this game,” Zieba concluded. “Maybe we will be on this new wave of new IPs.”
Cronos: The New Dawn is set to arrive later this year. Stay tuned. For more, Check out our interview with the writer of Predator: Killer of Killers, Micho Robert Rutare.
