After Bloober Team’s excellent Silent Hill 2 remake, I’m willing to give the developer the benefit of the doubt when it comes to its brand of horror games. It certainly helps that its next effort, Cronos: The New Dawn, looks incredible and is giving off gory Dead Space vibes.
Cronos: The New Dawn co-directors Wojciech Piejko and Jacek Zięba make their inspirations pretty explicit in a new look at the sci-fi survival horror game. Cronos draws on John Carpenter’s The Thing, German TV series Dark, and Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys for inspiration, the duo say, as well as games like Dead Space and Dark Souls. Cronos shares some familiar attributes from Dead Space, including terrifying human mutations as enemies, an over-the-shoulder shooting perspective, and a limb-severing mechanic — though Piejko says Bloober Team is taking a different approach to dismemberment than Visceral Games did.
In a follow-up to a cinematic reveal trailer for Cronos: The New Dawn released last October, Piejko and Zięba showed off some gameplay in a new dev diary Bloober Team released Thursday. The pair explain how protagonist the Traveller, who they liken to a deep-sea diver who plunges into the depths of time, is sent into the ruins of human civilization to extract survivors. The alternate-reality world of Cronos has been ravaged by an event called the Change, which in the game’s fiction, destroyed our world in the 1980s.
Piejko and Zięba previously worked on Bloober Team’s Observer and The Medium, so they have plenty of experience with sci-fi and psychological horror. Cronos: The New Dawn is an original property for Bloober, which is also working on a follow-up with Konami.
