Bloober Teamjust doesn’tstop. The double-A horror developer — whichKonamidrafted to the big leagues for theSilent Hill 2 remake— is working at a rare clip for the modern industry.
While most developers are putting out one game every three-to-five years, Bloober has releasedThe Medium,Layers of Fear, and Silent Hill 2 all since 2021. As I prepared to fly home from theGame Developers Conferencewhere I had just seen the studio’s next game,Cronos: The New Dawn, It went andannounced another one. This is a studio that worksfast.
To be fair, the quality is not, admittedly, always there. I loveObserverand Silent Hill 2, but could take or leave Layers of Fear and actively dislikedBlair Witch. The good news is that Cronos: The New Dawn looks like it’s combining some of the best aspects of Observer and Silent Hill 2 into a sci-fi survival horror game that both charts new territory for the studio while sticking to what it does best.
At GDC, I experienced a hands-off demo and caught up with game directors Wojciech Piejko and Jacek Zięba about what to expect from Cronos, how the game builds on Silent Hill 2, and what’s next for Bloober Team.
Back To The Bloober
You play as the Traveler, a representative of the mysterious Collective, who is repeatedly sent back in time to a mid-apocalypse 1980s Poland in an attempt to extract people who could play an important role in humanity’s future survival.
On these missions, you have to be ever vigilant, dealing with zombie-like former humans who will merge with each other into larger, fleshier monstrosities if you don’t stop them with quick wits and smart use of a flamethrower.
If that sounds action-packed, well, Piejko and Zięba note that Cronos is much moreResident Evil 4than Silent Hill 2, despite their team working closely alongside Bloober’s SH2 team.
“We [had] a better start knowing they [had] start[ed] doing a [third]-person survival horror and create[d] some tools… We can check how they did it, and prepare our prototypes a bit faster because of that,” Zięba says, “but then diverge the game to a more action-oriented direction.”
“Of course, we are also playtesting [each others'] games,” Piejko adds. “We were the first to playtest Silent Hill and they were the first to playtest Cronos.”
Though I didn’t get to go hands-on with Cronos, it was clear watching Zięba play that it’s going for something different than Silent Hill 2. I wrote before thatSilent Hill 2 is best when its controls are worst, when it’s refusing to allow you to lock-on to an enemy in the shadows because knowing exactly where your attacker is would diminish the terror. Cronos looks like theotherkind of survival horror game — the kind where precision and quick reflexes are essential.
Though the directors know it’s inevitable their game will be compared to recent survival horror titles like the RE4 and Dead Space remakes, they instead compare the games to similar pizzas with different toppings. As a pizza fiend, I like that metaphor. Piejko also points out that they have something unique in their core enemy mechanic.
“Our merging system is something that distinguishes our game from the others.”
“Of course, our merging system is something that distinguishes our game from the others. The enemies can absorb [their] fallen brothers or sisters. To evolve, become stronger, and push the game into a more strategic approach to combat because you need to pay attention to what’s going on on the battlefield,” Piejko says. “It’s not a game only about shooting and accuracy, but repositioning, checking what’s in your inventory, crafting, [and] inventory management.”
From what I saw of the game, it does seem essential to keep your wits about you. Two corpses lying near each other can easily fuse into one bigger bruiser if you’re not careful. The more bodies they add, the harder they hit. If you haven’t watched your ammo, you’ll find yourself between a rock and a hard place.
Bloober’s New Dawn
Seeing Cronos, after Bloober had made Silent Hill 2 and The Medium, had me wondering whether the studio was done with the first-person narrative adventures (walking sims, if you’re feeling less charitable) that defined its early output. As an Observer fan, I would love to see Bloober return to its roots for a sequel. But does Bloober want to go back to that earlier paradigm?
“I think we are past that,” Zięba, who sees third-person survival horror as the studio’s future, says.
“We evolve with each of our games,” Piejko agrees. “And each one is bigger, more gameplay-oriented, and we like this route. We are both fans of survival horror games, so [being able to create a new IP with Cronos] was like a dream come true for us.”
We’ll have to wait until we can get our hands on the game later this year to know whether it will be a dream come true for fans. Even if it isn’t, another Bloober game will probably arrive before long.
