After scoring a major win with the critically-lauded Silent Hill 2 remake, Bloober is ready to show the world what they can do next – with a slight change of pace – in an action-oriented horror game called Cronos: The New Dawn. I got a chance to sit down with Bloober’s time-hopping latest and find out what makes the world of Cronos so compelling.
Cronos puts you in control of a character called The Traveler, a woman tasked with going into areas ravaged by a human-eliminating virus that is rapidly transforming them into monsters. The Traveler’s goal is to not only log her observations and find human survivors, but also to lay a path for Travelers that come after her – just as those who came before her did. But that task is easier said than done.
“The theme of this game is merging and changing into something new,” co-director Wojciech Piejko explains, before adding, “Hey, this is not a good way to actually play this game, but watch this.”
Piejko proceeds to wake up a sleeping enemy with a stomp that can only be described as Dead Space-esque. Upon waking, the enemy noticed that the corpses of other monsters were littered around, and quickly went to consume one. Then another. Then a third. By the time the infected human had finished feasting (uninterrupted by Piejko), it had “merged” several times, essentially leveling up its monster type. In doing so, it became stronger, harder to kill, more aggressive, and had access to new abilities to take The Traveler out, such as spitting toxic bile at her. After a fair amount of ammo, it finally goes down.
The only way The Traveler could have prevented this happening is to kill the monster before it has a chance to feast or rid the area of corpses using fire, a precious resource that can’t be used capriciously. That said, bigger monsters mean bigger rewards, so it is sometimes a good choice to burn some resources for a bigger payday of crafting materials.
“This is the core of Cronos,” Piejko says. “Manage your resources, take risks when appropriate, and survive.”
Just because a monster does not awaken does not mean The Traveler is safe, however. Anyone that tries to hoard resources will soon discover when backtracking through areas that enemies have a tendency to pick inopportune moments to pop up and start merging with other corpses on the ground. Not being aware of your environment can be a deadly mistake in Cronos, but wasting resources may be even worse.
The demo I participated in takes place in Nowa Huta, an eastern district in Krakow, Poland that was once an industrial hub of the former Soviet Union. In the future, it has been torn apart by the monster-plague infecting the world. It is the Traveler’s duty to identify important people that live or lived in the city and employ time-travel to rescue them from the pre-plague age of the 1980s. Since only The Traveler can hop through time, rescuing them involves digitizing their souls to carry around with her to take back into the present.
The Traveler is limited in how many souls she can carry with her, which leaves the choice up to the player to decide who gets saved and who does not. This can affect Cronos’s narrative, as different people will have different reactions to things The Traveler encounters and places she goes. As an example, The Traveler can rescue someone in the past and bring them to the future, wherein she visits that person’s apartment decades later and the former tenant describes their life before it all went to hell.
In another example given, two of the souls in possession have a history and go back and forth with each other.
Bloober says that Cronos will contain an emphasis on the studio’s trademark psychological horror despite the action bent. After Silent Hill 2 released, which was developed in parallel with Cronos, the Cronos team absorbed their colleagues (or “merged,” to keep it thematically on-brand) to help finish the game out.
Oh, and throughout Nowa Huta, The Traveler will come across some less conversational survivors: cats. Kitties are locked away safely in various rooms throughout the game and, upon being rescued, help with resources for The Traveler. All the cats in the game are based on the pets of the developers at Bloober.
“We had so many submissions we had to start casting for them to decide who would get in,” Piejko says.
As part of their 1-2 punch with Silent Hill 2, Bloober is hoping Cronos proves the studio’s mettle as an industry-leading horror game developer. The New Dawn’s premise and designs are helping it start off on an interesting foot as part of Bloober’s journey there.
