Having thoroughly enjoyed Bloober Team’s fantastic remake of Silent Hill 2, I’m ready to trust their knack for crafting horror games. Adding to my excitement, their upcoming project, Cronos: The New Dawn, is shaping up to be a visual feast, reminiscent of the gruesomeness we loved in Dead Space.
The game’s co-directors, Wojciech Piejko and Jacek Zięba, are quite open about their creative influences, drawing from a mix of both films and TV shows like John Carpenter’s The Thing, the German series Dark, and Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys. In addition, they’re inspired by games such as Dead Space and Dark Souls. Cronos incorporates several elements seen in Dead Space, including horrifying human mutations as adversaries, a third-person viewpoint, and a unique system for dismembering your foes. However, Piejko assures fans that Bloober Team is putting its own twist on the dismemberment mechanic, diverging from what Visceral Games did.
Following last October’s cinematic reveal of Cronos: The New Dawn, Piejko and Zięba recently unveiled some gameplay footage in a developer diary released by Bloober Team on Thursday. In it, they elaborated on the story and mechanics involving the protagonist, known as the Traveller. Similar to a deep-sea diver exploring unknown depths, the Traveller ventures into the remnants of human civilization to rescue survivors. The game’s universe, an alternate reality, has been left in ruins by a cataclysmic event called the Change, which, within this narrative, brought destruction to our world back in the 1980s.
Piejko and Zięba’s experience in the sci-fi and psychological horror genre is extensive, having previously contributed to Bloober Team’s Observer and The Medium. Meanwhile, Cronos: The New Dawn emerges as a fresh concept for Bloober, even as they collaborate with Konami on upcoming projects.
