Cronos: The New Dawn Preview

How Bloober Team and Naughty Dog are similar?

When Bloober Team recently unveiled their brand new survival horror game, Cronos: The New Dawn, which also happens to be the studios first original IP, I couldn’t help but think about The Last of Us. Not because these games look similar, because they don’t, but because despite Bloobers recent release of the Silent Hill 2 Remake, which is both critically acclaimed and commercially successful by selling over a million copies in a week, people are still going to hold them to their older standards and say that it was just a Remake and any studio could have done it, which negates everything positive that they did.

Before I share why I think this is unfair, it’s important to remember that studios change and hopefully evolve over time. They learn from their mistakes, from their successes and implement this knowledge into their next games. This is how a studio grows

Naughty Dog would be on the shortlist of one of the best gaming studios around today, but Naughty Dog’s first game wasn’t The Last of Us. Their first game wasn’t even Crash Bandicoot! As a matter of fact, the studio had six games before Crash Bandicoot landed on PlayStation in 1996. I don’t think people said “well I wasn’t crazy about their work on Math Jam”. Instead, once Crash Bandicoot was released, people started to believe in their work and began to trust Naughty Dog based on what they did with Crash.

So why should you believe in Bloober Team and be excited for Cronos: The New Dawn?

After playing the Silent Hill 2 Remake, we walked away extremely impressed. We felt that there was a lot of risk involved for a lot of reasons, but ultimately scored the game a nine, and ended up saying “blooberteam found a way to make one of the best horror games of all time even better”.

For this reason alone, we cannot wait to play Cronos: The New Dawn. We are going to be optimistic and be excited for Bloober Team and their next game, their first original IP, but we understand how most people would say that they just remade an already great game that had an already great foundation. However, I would argue that this viewpoint is a little shortsighted coming from someone who finished Silent Hill Remake 2 and someone who has played many of the iconic survival horror remakes over the years including Dead Space and Resident Evil 2.

Yes, there was a blueprint for Silent Hill 2 already in place, but Bloober Team did a lot more than just update the visuals of a game from 2001. Bloober Team almost doubled the length of the original Silent Hill 2, and made plenty of smart and nuanced decisions. There was some great cinematography, the voice acting improved ten fold, the cutscenes were deeply engaging and overall they were able to keep the soul of the game, but removed a lot of the campiness. These changes increased immersion greatly and the overall feeling that remained was a much darker, oppressive and psychological experience. This doesn’t even touch on the mechanics of Silent Hill 2 Remake, which were mostly great.

CRONOS: THE NEW DAWN

Let’s turn our focus on their new IP, Cronos: The New Dawn and in addition to coming off the Silent Hill 2 Remake, the trailer gave strong hints of Dead Space with a weapon that looked like the plasma cutter, as well as what looks like something similar to the RIG with lights in a similar place on the spine. It also evoked Returnal with the sci fi time traveling theme, both of which are incredible strong sci fi inspirations to pull from.

Cronos is continuing to focus on what Bloober Team have been doing which is third person survival horror, but this time there is a time traveling sci fi backdrop for the horror. Sound design plays such a large role in horror and one of the aspects of the trailer that caught my attention was the sound that the gun made when firing. It had such a unique futuristic pitch to it, which reminded me of the incredible sound design in the Silent Hill 2 Remake.

The game description reads “Cronos is set in a grim world where Eastern European brutalism meets retro futurist technology. You play as a traveler, who must scour the wastelands of the future in search of time rifts that will send you back to 1980’s Poland. Once there your mission is to locate key people who perished in the apocalypse. Using your all powerful harvester, you need to extract their essences and have them accompany you in the future.” One can only assume that the people you need to locate have an important role in altering the events that happen or have happened. They somehow the capability or knowledge to reverse the events of the past somehow if they are able to use future technology.

I think almost as important as what a studio has done, is what a studio has done lately. When it comes to what has Bloober Team done lately? They took one of the best survival horror games of all time and made it better in almost every conceivable way.

This doesn’t mean that they are off the hook for their inconsistent work in the past and blindly trust them no matter what moving forward. It does mean that without a doubt, they proved they have the ability to make an amazing survival horror game and we are easily very excited about Cronos: The New Dawn and optimistic they can stick the landing.