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When the Silent Hill 2 remake proved to be so good, some have been gradual to provide 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 pretty much as good a place to begin as any, and Bloober Staff’s earlier works have been usually met with blended critiques at best–the staff hasn’t shied away from its historical past. To me, it was nonetheless a tall process to reside as much as a sport that so many maintain so expensive. However in the event you rely your self amongst those that are ready to see if the Polish staff can do it once more, and with one thing completely of its personal creation, Cronos: The New Dawn is beginning to seem like that sport.
Again in October of final yr, Bloober Staff instructed me that it is most likely at all times going to be a studio that makes horror video games, and at Summer season Recreation Fest Play Days 2025, the staff made it clear that it needed to seek out its personal gameplay hook with its subsequent mission. It checked out Lifeless Area’s fight that drove gamers to chop off limbs and Alan Wake’s approach of stripping enemies of their “shields” utilizing mild sources, and it knew it did not need its subsequent sport to be a easy point-and-shoot horror sport. From that steerage, the “merge system” was born.
As a result of the time-traveling horror story is about each earlier than and after an epidemic wipes out a lot of humanity, the locations you discover are sometimes residence to a large number of lifeless our bodies. Issues fell aside quick, and what’s left of individuals have usually been morphed into “orphans,” the sport’s identify for its enemy monsters. These grotesque brutes come in several styles and sizes. Some are armored, others shoot acidic puke at you. Some fling slimy, crimson tentacles towards your face.
Any one among these might be formidable, however the sport’s merge system permits enemies to mix right into a single being, stack a number of skills without delay, and basically grow to be boss battles of the participant’s personal negligence. To do that, enemies will merely transfer towards a physique and take in it, inheriting its skills. The sport’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 analogous 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 sport.”
Piejko instructed me that in testing the sport, the staff initially did not put any restrictions on what number of occasions enemies might 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 atmosphere. However the sport’s approach of permitting enemies to seep into each other and create super-enemies instantly felt just like the staff had discovered the hook it was searching for.
Gamers might 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 sport, so you possibly can wager that is a troublesome commodity to return by. From that, powerful moment-to-moment selections will likely be made: Do you utilize the flamethrower to preemptively dispatch the potential enemies earlier than they have been reborn, or do you save the flamethrower gas to provide your self some respiration room in a combat in your life?
Past the merge system, I noticed a sport that was additional alongside in growth than I would anticipated, provided that it was solely introduced lower than a yr in the past. The gunplay appeared troublesome in the best way 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 cheap definitions of lived-in areas, and even a secure room with its personal piece within the soundtrack. Notes and audio logs crammed 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 seems 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 combination of survival-horror fight and exploration, whereas acquainted, appears to be like actually good from this distance. I at all times err on the aspect of warning once I’ve seen solely a portion of a a lot bigger sport I will play in full later, however I additionally really feel compelled to state that Cronos: The New Dawn might very properly cement a brand new, extra hopeful narrative round this studio.