When the Silent Hill 2 remake proved to be so good, some have been gradual to present Bloober Staff a lot credit score, citing the way it had a robust blueprint to construct from. It is true that Konami’s landmark authentic is nearly as good a place to begin as any, and Bloober Team’s earlier works have been typically met with combined evaluations at best–the group hasn’t shied away from its historical past. To me, it was nonetheless a tall process to stay as much as a recreation that so many maintain so pricey. However should you rely your self amongst those that are ready to see if the Polish group can do it once more, and with one thing totally of its personal creation, Cronos: The New Dawn is beginning to seem like that recreation.
Again in October of final yr, Bloober Staff informed me that it is most likely all the time going to be a studio that makes horror video games, and at Summer season Sport Fest Play Days 2025, the group made it clear that it needed to search out its personal gameplay hook with its subsequent undertaking. It checked out Useless Area’s fight that drove gamers to chop off limbs and Alan Wake’s manner of stripping enemies of their “shields” utilizing mild sources, and it knew it did not need its subsequent recreation to be a easy point-and-shoot horror recreation. From that steering, the “merge system” was born.
As a result of the time-traveling horror story is ready each earlier than and after an epidemic wipes out a lot of humanity, the locations you discover are sometimes house to a large number of useless our bodies. Issues fell aside quick, and what’s left of individuals have typically been morphed into “orphans,” the sport’s identify for its enemy monsters. These grotesque brutes come in several sizes and styles. Some are armored, others shoot acidic puke at you. Some fling slimy, crimson tentacles towards your face.
Any considered one of these will be formidable, however the recreation’s merge system permits enemies to mix right into a single being, stack a number of talents without delay, and primarily grow to be boss battles of the participant’s personal negligence. To do that, enemies will merely transfer towards a physique and soak up it, inheriting its talents. The recreation’s tagline, “Do not allow them to merge,” says all of it. Wojciech Piejko, the sport’s co-director who led me on the hands-off demo, jokingly made an identical level as he purposely allowed the monsters to develop for the sake of the demo. “This isn’t how it’s best to play this recreation.”
Piejko informed me that in testing the sport, the group initially did not put any restrictions on what number of occasions enemies may merge, giving start to towering monstrosities that grew to become too large to slot in doorways at occasions. Now, the sport can have some restrictions on that system, like enemies that do not merge, and naturally, correct boss battles are sometimes siloed in a managed surroundings. However the recreation’s manner of permitting enemies to seep into each other and create super-enemies instantly felt just like the group had discovered the hook it was in search of.
Gamers may stop these mergers from occurring by swiftly killing enemies, or much more proactively, by burning our bodies earlier than they reanimated, however your flamethrower, which you discharge like a round area-of-effect assault with a button press, requires gas, and it is a horror recreation, so you may wager that is a tricky commodity to return by. From that, robust moment-to-moment selections shall be made: Do you employ the flamethrower to preemptively dispatch the potential enemies earlier than they have been reborn, or do you save the flamethrower gas to present your self some respiration room in a battle to your life?
Past the merge system, I noticed a recreation that was additional alongside in improvement than I would anticipated, provided that it was solely introduced lower than a yr in the past. The gunplay appeared tough in the way in which it ought to, with headshots laborious to tug off on enemies–even when these enemies had a number of heads. The exploration was filled with basic survival-horror tropes that I admittedly have not grown sick of: locked gates needing boltcutters, environmental puzzles that pressure affordable definitions of lived-in areas, and even a secure room with its personal piece within the soundtrack. Notes and audio logs stuffed within the backstory to a purposely confounding story impressed by Netflix’s Darkish. The third-person survival-horror gameplay definitely stands on the shoulders of video games and tales which have come earlier than it.
Though they have been developed in tandem for some time and by totally different groups inside the studio, it appears like the teachings Bloober Staff realized from Silent Hill 2 are on show. Its time-twisting story has me actually to see extra, and the combo of survival-horror fight and exploration, whereas acquainted, seems to be actually good from this distance. I all the time err on the facet of warning once I’ve seen solely a portion of a a lot bigger recreation I will play in full later, however I additionally really feel compelled to state that Cronos: The New Dawn may very nicely cement a brand new, extra hopeful narrative round this studio.