Bloober’s next game is like if Dead Space and Silent Hill had a Polish baby

Bloober Team has long established itself as the supreme authority of the 7/10 horror game. Its breakout success, Layers of Fear, was a viral hit largely thanks to a plethora of jumpscares and one darkly funny moment where a baby runs into a wall. Good entertainment, but not quite elevated enough to compete with the big boys of survival horror. The reception to Silent Hill 2 Remake was brand rehabilitation in action, but standing on the shoulders of giants isn’t quite the same as rubbing shoulders with them.

Cronos The New Dawn is Bloober’s attempt to do just that, and expectations couldn’t be higher. Game director Jacek Zięba positions Cronos as a cumulative effort following decades of in-house iteration: “Observer introduces dialogue choices; Blair Witch taught us how to work with AI systems; The Medium marked our big transition from first-person to third-person perspective, which changed how we approached cutscene production.”

I’m afforded a glimpse of this cumulation in a closed-door preview of Cronos, held in Kraków’s Nowa Huta Steelworks. The over-the-shoulder perspective of the Traveler forging ahead, weapon raised, is a near-perfect match for James Sunderland’s model in Silent Hill 2 Remake. As you might expect, Bloober’s development of Cronos and Silent Hill is split into two separate teams, but neither exists in a vacuum. “Team members switch between the projects, which helps with knowledge sharing and cross-team experience,” Zięba clarifies.

Cronos, then. Protagonist Traveler ND-3576 is a temporal interloper dispatched into a post-apocalyptic rendition of 1980s Poland to search for ND-3500’s remains – or, more specifically, to retrieve the anchor attached to them and complete their mission. The unspoken implication here is that Cronos: The New Dawn’s protagonist is the 76th attempt to complete this objective. It’s not lost on me that this isn’t a million miles away from the central premise of 2025’s RPG darling, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.

Traveler ND-3576’s declaration that “the Vocation continues” is a close cousin to that of Expedition 33’s “for those who come after,” yet it strikes a very different chord. There’s a melancholic optimism to Lumière’s expeditions; the Vocation is, by definition, a mission that must be seen through to its end. If Lumière’s expeditions are the cumulative efforts of the indomitable human spirit, the Vocation is a procession of corpses that lead like stepping stones to the next objective.

Plagues have been an endemic threat in survival horror since the genre’s inception, but it’s impossible to ignore the echo of COVID-19 in Cronos. The remnants of humanity, dubbed Orphans, coalesce into a writhing mass of meat tentacles wrapped around an emaciated corpse. They exist in a happy medium between Resident Evil’s Mold and Dead Space’s Necromorphs; when they aren’t playing dead or lurching around corners, they’re dragging themselves out of tumescent growths that line the walls. Orphans begin life as little more than polycephalic shamblers, but leave them to merge with their fallen brethren, and they quickly become a problem.

The Merge system is Cronos: The New Dawn’s showpiece, and Bloober’s greatest challenge. Zięba deems it the most complex feature the studio has ever developed. “At first, the monsters would just devour each other like ghouls, with no limits,” he explains. “They could grow so large they wouldn’t even fit through doors.” While these runaway variants sound fun in theory, they wouldn’t do much for my survival, which often teeters on the brink in this refined iteration.

Survival horror is always at its best when its combat is as much a puzzle as sliding mosaic tiles or shadow manipulation, and this preview reassures me that Bloober understands that, too. Cronos’s combat works because it’s the onus of the player to control all the variables within it. This starts with the usual survival horror principles – ration your ammunition, stay on the move, pick up everything – and extends to the Merge system itself. If you’re putting down Orphans left and right and paying no heed to disposal, you’re feeding the beast.

“There’s a fine line between challenge and frustration, and we did everything we could to stay on the right side of it,” Zięba says. As much as Cronos preserves the panic of traditional survival horror, there are myriad ways to mitigate its difficulty. Containers that dispense an endless supply of fire torches inevitably lead me to backtrack multiple times to stock up, their value in burning bodies and killing anything that gets too close disproportionate to any other tool in the Traveler’s arsenal.

Orchestrated combat sequences are obvious, usually in an open space that’s a little too quiet for comfort. Running blindly through a park square littered with bodies is a surefire way to get caught in an ambush; instead, I carefully pick my way around its outskirts, testing the liveliness of corpses with an Isaac Clarke-approved stomp and dispatching them before they can merge with their nearest pal. A mandatory jaunt through an underground flesh cave, the only way forward in Cronos’s linear level design, is far more difficult to emerge unscathed.

In these claustrophobic confines, I’m forced to rely on the environment to gain the upper hand, ducking behind pillars to force space between myself and the Orphan mob that springs up to meet me. I wait for enough of them to stray just close enough to an explosive canister to dispense one of my precious bullets and catch as many as possible in the blast. It’s a frenetic skirmish that forces me to think logically in an encounter designed to make me panic.

“After years of developing horror games that were closer to adventure titles, we wanted to evolve,” Zięba tells me. “We were ready to do it by going heavy on gameplay.” Traveler ND-3576’s weapon of choice is the Relic, a shapeshifting firearm that evokes Control’s Service Weapon in its minimalist utility. Once the requisite modules are attached, the Relic can be a pistol, a shotgun, or even brass knuckles for close-quarters melee. Extra modules also take up valuable inventory space – no matter the future’s advancements, Resident Evil’s Tetris-style inventories persist.

When evaluated in its separate parts, Cronos isn’t a grand innovation for the realm of survival horror. Even the Merge system, while a foundational pillar, isn’t exactly a new mechanical phenomenon. From Kirby to Dark Souls, players have been consuming the essence of enemies to enhance and evolve their virtual avatars for decades. The concept of corpse “management” is a major principle in Dead Space, Project Zomboid, and Resident Evil.

“We didn’t set out to create something that would wipe other survival horror games off the map,” Zięba clarifies. “It was more like: let’s do something different.” For Bloober, that difference lies in aesthetics, at least initially. “Brutalist architecture is monumental, epic, and terrifying at the same time. It’s also a powerful reflection of its era. But we have to remember — we didn’t just choose an architectural style; we chose an entire district.”

Kraków’s Nowa Huta is a socialist realist emblem of Poland’s history and culture, and it’s the direct inspiration for the fictional city of New Dawn. “We chose it because of its unique history and architecture — a utopian city built from scratch on empty fields, centered around what was once the largest steel factory in all of Europe.”

Heading into the Nowa Huta Steelworks interior is like stepping back in time. There is an eerie, pervasive sense that the staff had one day all collectively got up and left, scavenging everything of value that wasn’t nailed down as they went. Endless white corridors converge on spiralling marble staircases that stand in counterpoint to the broken blinds and threadbare carpets in adjoining offices.

The same suspension of space and time extends to Cronos. Dust motes swirl in a lighting system choked by fog, and mannequins cast long shadows in the neon glow of futuristic technology. The atmosphere is thick and oppressive, claustrophobic even when traversing streets open to New Dawn’s sky. Below my feet, in the Nowa Huta bomb shelter, telephones balance precariously in their cradles and maps adorn the walls, so different yet not so far away.

In the booming landscape of Poland’s games industry, 11 Bit Studios, CD Projekt Red, Techland, and CI Games all hold court alongside Bloober. Frostpunk, This War of Mine, The Witcher, Lords of the Fallen – a dour-faced cynicism runs through them all, a testament to human resilience made possible at the expense of morality. Nevertheless, Cronos is unapologetically Polish in a way few games are, even by its native studios.

“We’ve stopped being ‘hesitant’ about Poland,” Zięba agrees. “The Witcher wouldn’t exist if some Polish developers hadn’t fallen in love with Sapkowski’s books and believed that we, too, had something to say and show to the world. Something that is ours — that comes from Poland, not from somewhere else.” It’s telling that the closest Bloober has ever come to critical acclaim before Silent Hill 2 Remake is also the closest it’s come to embracing its Polish identity. Observer, a cyberpunk detective game whose mind-hacking premise was likened to the “psychological rape” of its Cracovian underclass, was not technically perfect, but it certainly had something to say.

Zięba is forthcoming about Bloober’s pitch and approach for Cronos, but he remains tight-lipped when it comes to its more original components. Time is the crux of Cronos; it’s literally in the name. Traveler ND-3576’s mission is to extract people from the historic timeline who might be able to avert the post-apocalyptic future, but the full implications of this remain to be seen. What happens if we refuse that calling?

“Good question,” Zięba coyly remarks. “Whatever idea you have – or will have – about [Traveler ND-3576] after the first 1-2 hours of playing will dramatically change as the story unfolds.” The Traveler’s predecessor is functionally identical, insofar as they wear the same industrial sci-fi diving suit. Whether this is a clone remains to be seen; obviously, we can’t rule out a time loop situation, either.

As far as horror games go, Cronos isn’t the scariest I’ve played. Perhaps I’ve become desensitized – my benchmark for scares sits at PT, Alien Isolation, and SOMA – but it’s hard to feel vulnerable when your digital avatar is a combat-ready armored shell. This isn’t so much a complaint as it is expectation management. Orphans popping up from the floor and leaping out of doorways are a common enough occurrence to keep me on my proverbial toes, but for the bulk of my preview, I’m left to marinate in the atmosphere of post-apocalyptic Poland. Overall, it’s a more constructive gameplay experience than an endless procession of jumpscares, and it’s all the better for it.

If this all sounds like Dead Space and Resident Evil had a Soviet baby, well, you’re not wrong. Cronos doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it does add a few new spokes and a coat of cement-grey paint. “We see Cronos as our love letter to the survival horror genre […] a place where old-school meets new-school,” Zięba says. We haven’t seen a third-person survival horror that isn’t a sequel or remake in some time, and in that regard, Cronos is a breath of fresh air in a landscape that’s grown a bit stale. It’s nigh-on impossible to decouple Cronos from its myriad influences, but cumulatively, it’s just original enough to have me excited for an original project from Bloober for probably, well, the first time ever.