There’s never been a better time to test your gaming survival instincts than right now. Think you can climb a mountain with a troupe of adorable crashlanded scouts? There’s Peak. Or, say you want to build an empire one wooden log at a time? Well, Valheim might be the game for you.
Still, with so much competition, it can feel hard to stand out. Enter Cronos: The New Dawn, a time-travelling horror game from Bloober Team, which draws from real-world history to frame its world. At Gamescom this year, we sat down with the project's Lead Writer, Grzegorz Like, to discuss the inspirations behind the studio’s latest foray into horror, including Poland’s complex past, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and 1982’s The Thing.
“At some point in Bloober Team, we realised that we're really good at putting Poland into games,” explains Like. “We did that in The Observer, we did that in The Medium, but we’ve never done it on such a big scale.”
In Cronos, players step into the metallic stompers of a mysterious ‘Traveler’ whose job is to survive in a desolate wasteland version of Poland in the wake of an event called the Change. As the player searches for and harvests the souls of survivors, they also must navigate between rifts in time, managing scarce resources and fending off mutating figures. The world is eerie and uncomfortable, with every creaky floorboard or whistle of wind reminding you just how isolated you are.
Cronos isn’t set in a fantasy region, though, and the game is based on the real-world district of Nowa Huta, which is located just outside of central Krakow (the studio's home base). “The whole district is a communist district that was built just after the war, when Poland was under the influence of the Soviet Union – dark times,” Like says.
“But because of the darkness, we really thought it worked well to bind that with the themes we wanted to tackle throughout the game,” Like continues. “Cronos is a bit about togetherness and humanity – but the question is, what if when people get together and something bad happens?”
The ‘bad’ in question is the aforementioned ‘Change’, a virus that allows ‘humans’ to merge into violent, fleshy monstrosities. “(In Cronos) being together is not really a good thing,” Like notes. “In real life in Poland, we’ve stood against the Soviet Union, and we basically destroyed the government with solidarity. We asked ourselves, What if there was no martial law introduced because of the sickness?” Like made reference to the cult anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion, noting a psychological metaphor it taps into called the ‘Hedgehog Dilemma’, “Basically, (people) hurt each other when they're getting close.”
Human Instrumentality
Despite its heavy undertones, Like clarified that the team wasn’t trying to make any sweeping political statements and were simply drawing from their own experience, with Like having grown up in the area. “We knew that [what we had] was good, but we needed to be very gentle and conscious while telling the story,” Like explains. “It’s good when you're telling a story like this to have a background, and the communist background was really, really rich.” Like said. “And we don't need to research,” they joke.
To give Cronos a personal feel, the team didn’t rely on new imagery to create the brutalist setting. Instead of creating images for the location, though, they instead reached out to family members in search of memories of the area from their childhoods. “Because we wanted to reproduce the vibe of the town, we decided not to generate photographs or take photographs.” Like says. “I showed the trailer to my mom, because she's still living there in Nowa Huta, and she was like, What did you do? Destroy the whole city?” he joked.
It’s easy to understand her reaction, especially considering how abandoned Cronos feels in motion. Walls are graffitied, furniture overturned, and all signs of regular life seem to be snuffed out. Like would often visit the art team to try to tweak how the models came together. “It was really a pain for all the 3D artists,” he joked. “[They’d say] It's a game. It's not a museum," he continued. “It is for me.”
Early in our demo, we encountered a bulletin board overflowing with missing persons flyers, a quick reminder that the mishapen bodies we would face once belonged to the regular people of the town. Solid world building, Like explained, some of the family members who assisted the team with photos, also ended up as the faces of those missing persons. “[The family members] all needed to sign papers and all that, and they are now in the game,” Like explains.
Working in the shadows
Still, despite these personal touches, Like isn’t naive to the fact that Cronos is being compared to other horror games such as Dead Space and Resident Evil. “Cronos is our love letter to all those games,” Like says. “(But) while creating the new IP, we decided to treat ourselves and to create a (game) that will scratch all our itches.”
Hot off the heels of the studio’s success with Silent Hill 2 Remake, Bloober Team was keen to push in a different direction with Cronos. “We knew that we needed to do something other than James Sunderland again,” says Like. “That one was very psychological… We also wanted Cronos to be deep, but in a different direction, so we thought about different genres and sub-genres of horror, and we decided on not only some sci-fi, but also body horror.”
During the research phase, Like recounts how the team found inspiration in John Carpenter’s 1982 sci-fi thriller, The Thing. “The design of the monsters was taken from that one,” Like explains. “But, we needed to make it work as an adversary in a game, so we also decided to create this merge system to make it unique for the players.”
As players explore Cronos, they’ll find the remnants of society, which the game refers to as Orphans, contorted into odd shapes. If you fail to remove each foe tactically, they can combine forces, swelling into a vastly more threatening enemy – a unique system that forces you to act with intent.
“It's always nice to have an adversary that does a funny thing on their own, and you don't have to know the script of the whole fight – (stuff) just happens,” Like notes. “Very early in the game, you can end up having a boss fight, and it's not scripted; it's there because you didn’t play well.”
Cronos: The New Dawn is paying homage to the slew of horror games that have come before, infusing that tried and true methodology with an intriguing enemy system and a boatload of personal lore. While we won’t know how that will shake out until it launches next week, Like left us with some wisdom on how to survive. “Be prepared and have your guns reloaded, manage your inventory right, and you'll be fine – every battle is a puzzle – And of course, read all the notes.”
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