After Silent Mountain 2, Cronos: New Dawn May Complete the Redemption Arc for Bruber Team

when Silent Hill 2 Remake It turns out that this is so great that some people can build a strong blueprint from it with a strong blueprint, which has earned a lot of praise from the Bloober team. Indeed, Konami's landmark originals are as good as either, and early work by the Bloober team is usually filled with mixed reviews –The team has not shied away from its history. It's still a tall task for me to live up to a game that's so precious. But if you're waiting for the Polish team to do this again, and with your creativity, Cronos: New Dawn starts to look like that game.

Back in October last year, the Bloober team told me that this may always be a studio that makes horror games, and in the 2025 Summer Game Festival competition era, the team made it clear that it hopes to find its own gameplay with the next project. It studies the way Dead Space fights, driving players to cut off their limbs, Alan Wake uses light sources to strip their “shields”, and it knows it doesn't want the next game to be a simple scoring horror game. From this guide, a “merge system” was born.

Because long horror stories are set before and after the pandemic wipes out humans, the place you explore is often home to many corpses. Things quickly collapsed, and what people left behind was often turned into “orphans”, the name of the game's enemy monster. These weird savages come in different shapes and sizes. Some are armored, others are shooting at you with acidic. Some dragged sticky crimson tentacles towards your face.

Any of them can be powerful, but the game's merge system allows enemies to merge into a single existence, stack multiple abilities at a time, and essentially become the player's own neglected boss battle. To do this, the enemy will simply move towards the body and absorb it, thus inheriting its abilities. The game's slogan “Don't let them merge”. The game's co-director Wojciech Piejko led me to the enable demo, and he jokingly made a similar point because he deliberately allowed monsters to grow for the demo. “This is not the way you should play this game.”

Piejko told me that during the test game, the team initially did not have a limit on how many times the enemy could merge, resulting in towering monsters that sometimes became too big to fit in the doorway. Now the game will have some restrictions on the system, such as unmerged enemies, and of course, proper boss battles will usually be isolated in a controlled environment. However, the game is a way to make enemies infiltrate each other and create super enemies, just like the team found the hook it is looking for.

Players can burn their bodies by killing enemies quickly and even more aggressively, burning them before they resurrect, but your flamethrower, like a circular effect attack, requires fuel, which is a horrible game, so you can bet, you can bet, it is a tough commodity. As a result, you will make a difficult time choice: Do you use a flamethrower to snap up potential enemies before rebirth, or do you save the flamethrower fuel to give yourself some breathing space to fight for life?

In addition to merging the system, I've also seen a game that progressed during development, given that it was announced only less than a year ago. The gunfight looks difficult, even if these enemies have multiple heads, the avatar is hard to hit the enemy. Exploring objects full of classic survival horrors, I’m certainly not tired of it: locked doors require bolt drivers, environmental problems that make the rational definition of living space a reasonable definition, even a safe room with its own soundtrack. Notes and audio logs filled in the backstory are a story of intentional confusion inspired by the darkness of Netflix. The third-person survival horror gameplay is undoubtedly on the shoulders of the games and stories that preceded the game.

Although they were developed with different teams for a while in the studio, it felt like the lessons the Bloober team learned from Silent Hill 2. Its growing stories make me really interested to see more, and the mix of survival horror battles and exploration, while familiar, looks really good from this distance. When I only see a part of a bigger game, I'll go all out later, but I'll always be cautious, but I also feel compelled to say that Cronos: The new dawn is likely cementing the new, more promising narrative around this studio.