Cronos: New Dawn will play you as a soul-attracting time traveler
Blog Andrew Joseph 15 Jun , 2025 0
After a major victory with the acclaimed Silent Mountain 2 remake, Blober is ready to show the world what they can do next – slightly change – in an action-oriented horror game called Cronos: New Dawn. I had the opportunity to sit in Bloober’s latest time and find out what made Cronos so compelling.
Cronos puts you in control of a character called “Traveler”, the woman's mission is to enter an area damaged by a human-slaughtered virus that is rapidly transforming it into a monster. The goal of the traveler is not only to record her observations and find survivors of humanity, but also to pave the way for travelers who follow her – just like those who were before her. But this task is easier said than done.
“The theme of this game is to merge and become new,” explains co-director Wojciech Piejko. “Hey, this is not a good way to actually play this game, but to watch this game.”
Piejko continues to awaken an enemy that can only be described as dead space-like. After waking up, the enemy noticed that the bodies of other monsters were littered and quickly consumed one. Then there is another one. Then there is one third. When the infected person completes the feast (uninterrupted piejko), it has “merged” several times, essentially improving its monster type. By doing so, it becomes more powerful, harder to kill, more aggressive, and can use new abilities to bring travelers out, such as spitting toxic bile at her. After a lot of ammunition, it finally descended.
The only way a traveler can prevent this is to kill the monster before it has the chance to use the fire feast or get rid of the corpse, a precious resource that cannot be used without error. That said, bigger monsters mean bigger rewards, so sometimes a good choice to burn some resources for larger crafting materials paydays.
“This is the core of Cronos,” Piejko said. “Manage your resources, take risks in due time, and survive.”
But just because the monster is not awakened doesn't mean the traveler is safe. Anyone who tries to hoard resources will soon find out when enemies tend to pick out untimely moments to pop up and start merging with other bodies on the ground. Not knowing that your environment can be a fatal mistake, but wasting resources can be worse.
The demonstration I attended was held at Nowa Huta, an industrial hub of the former Soviet Union in the eastern region of Krakow, Poland. In the future, it will be torn apart by the monster bundle infected by the world. Travelers have the responsibility to identify important people who live in cities and use time travel to rescue them from the 1980s mass range. Since only travelers can jump, saving them involves digitizing their souls with them to take her back to the present.
The traveler has limited souls on how many souls she can carry with her, which makes the player's choice decide who is saved and who hasn't. This may affect Cronos' narrative, as different people react differently to what the traveler encounters and where she goes. For example, a traveler could rescue someone and take them to the future, and decades later, she visited that person’s apartment while the former tenant described their lives.
In another example given, the two souls possessed have history, walking back and forth to each other.
Despite the action, Cronos will focus on the studio’s trademark psychological horror, Bloober said. After the Silent Hill 2 release of development in parallel with Cronos, the Cronos team absorbed their colleagues (or “merge” to brand themed) to help complete the competition.
Oh, and throughout Nowa Huta, travelers will encounter some survivors who are not very conversational: cats. Throughout the game, the kitten is securely locked in various rooms and, upon rescue, provides resources for travelers. All cats in the game are based on pets from Bloober developers.
“We have a lot of submissions and we have to start promoting them to decide who will join,” Piejko said.
As part of their 1-2 punch with Silent Hill 2, Bloober hopes Cronos proves the studio’s courage to be an industry-leading horror game developer. The premise and design of the new dawn are helping it start with fun feet, which is part of Bloober's journey there.