When the Silent Hill 2 remake proved to be so good, some were slow to give Bloober Team much credit, citing how it had a strong blueprint to build from. It’s true that Konami’s landmark original is as good a starting point as any, and Bloober Team’s earlier works were often met with mixed reviews at best–the team hasn’t shied away from its history. To me, it was nonetheless a tall task to live up to a game that so many hold so dear. But if you count yourself among those who are waiting to see if the Polish team can do it again, and with something entirely of its own creation, Cronos: The New Dawn is starting to look like that game.
Back in October of last year, Bloober Team told me that it’s probably always going to be a studio that makes horror games, and at Summer Game Fest Play Days 2025, the team made it clear that it wanted to find its own gameplay hook with its next project. It looked at Dead Space’s combat that drove players to cut off limbs and Alan Wake’s way of stripping enemies of their “shields” using light sources, and it knew it didn’t want its next game to be a simple point-and-shoot horror game. From that guidance, the “merge system” was born.
Because the time-traveling horror story is set both before and after an epidemic wipes out much of humanity, the places you explore are often home to a great number of dead bodies. Things fell apart fast, and what’s left of people have often been morphed into “orphans,” the game’s name for its enemy monsters. These grotesque brutes come in different shapes and sizes. Some are armored, others shoot acidic puke at you. Some fling slimy, crimson tentacles toward your face.
Any one of these can be formidable, but the game’s merge system allows enemies to combine into a single being, stack multiple abilities at once, and essentially become boss battles of the player’s own negligence. To do this, enemies will simply move toward a body and absorb it, inheriting its abilities. The game’s tagline, “Don’t let them merge,” says it all. Wojciech Piejko, the game’s co-director who led me on the hands-off demo, jokingly made a similar point as he purposely allowed the monsters to grow for the sake of the demo. “This is not how you should play this game.”
Piejko told me that in testing the game, the team initially didn’t put any restrictions on how many times enemies could merge, giving birth to towering monstrosities that became too big to fit in doorways at times. Now, the game will have some restrictions on that system, like enemies that don’t merge, and of course, proper boss battles are often siloed in a controlled environment. But the game’s way of allowing enemies to seep into one another and create super-enemies immediately felt like the team had found the hook it was looking for.
Players could prevent these mergers from occurring by swiftly killing enemies, or even more proactively, by burning bodies before they reanimated, but your flamethrower, which you discharge like a circular area-of-effect attack with a button press, requires fuel, and this is a horror game, so you can bet that’s a tough commodity to come by. From that, tough moment-to-moment choices will be made: Do you use the flamethrower to preemptively dispatch the potential enemies before they’ve been reborn, or do you save the flamethrower fuel to give yourself some breathing room in a fight for your life?
Beyond the merge system, I saw a game that was further along in development than I’d anticipated, given that it was only announced less than a year ago. The gunplay looked difficult in the way it should, with headshots hard to pull off on enemies–even when those enemies had multiple heads. The exploration was full of classic survival-horror tropes that I admittedly haven’t grown sick of: locked gates needing boltcutters, environmental puzzles that strain reasonable definitions of lived-in spaces, and even a safe room with its own piece in the soundtrack. Notes and audio logs filled in the backstory to a purposely confounding tale inspired by Netflix’s Dark. The third-person survival-horror gameplay certainly stands on the shoulders of games and stories that have come before it.
Although they were developed in tandem for a while and by different teams within the studio, it feels like the lessons Bloober Team learned from Silent Hill 2 are on display. Its time-twisting story has me really interested to see more, and the mix of survival-horror combat and exploration, while familiar, looks really good from this distance. I always err on the side of caution when I’ve seen only a portion of a much larger game I’ll play in full later, but I also feel compelled to state that Cronos: The New Dawn could very well cement a new, more hopeful narrative around this studio.
