Hot off the heels of their impressive work on the Silent Hill 2 Remake and looking to build off their success, Bloober Team has come forward with the reveal trailer for their bold new IP Cronos: The New Dawn.
A third-person survival horror game that transports players into a retro-futuristic world, this new IP is design as a love-letter to such horror video game classics as Dead Space, Returnal, and Resident Evil.
Clocked at just under three minutes, the trailer opens with a rather atmospheric scene where a man, clad in a futuristic suit that looks like a mix of those worn by Isaac in Dead Space and Big Daddy in BioShock, plays chess with an older woman.
The surreal setting further sold by the mysterious blood stains on the chess figures, from there, the trailer moves to reveal a twisted, apocalyptic wasteland overrun by grotesque monsters.
According to an official press release sent to media outlets, Cronos will tell “a twisted time travel story set in an unforgiving post-apocalyptic future in 1980s Poland,” and task players with taking on “the role of a Traveler, an agent of the enigmatic Collective with a mission to extract selected people who didn’t survive the apocalypse from the past.”
While the trailer is mostly cinematic, it does offer brief glimpses of its third-person gameplay, all in all offering what appears to be a promising start for Bloober Team’s ambitious new project.
Founded in 2008 by Poitr Babieno and Piotr Bielatowicz, the Polish developer is known for developing psychological horror games, having found success in the genre with their previous titles Layers of Fear, Observer, and The Medium.
On the back of these releases, Konami eventually announced a strategic partnership with the studio in June 2021, with Tencent becoming one of their majority stakeholders (with a total holding of 22% of shares) in October of that same year.
In turn, Bloober Team would eventually collaborate with Konami to remake Silent Hill 2, which has received rave reviews for brilliantly capturing the original’s eerie atmosphere, taking the graphics to a new level thanks to Unreal Engine 5, and giving players modern controls, all the while keeping the dire story of James Sunderland intact.
While it did feature some controversial changes to certain characters including Eddie, Laura, and Angela, and more than a few players consider them to be a mistake, they overall weren’t egregious enough to sink the game’s critical and commercial reception – nor did they stop it from ushering in a new era for the studio.
Interestingly, it seems that with Cronos: The New Dawn, Bloober Team will be temporarily setting aside its usual psychological themes and instead be using their work on the Silent Hill 2 Remake as a starting point to jump straight into the survival horror genre.
It remains to be seen how things play out for Bloober Team and their new title, but if they can bring the same quality and atmosphere to it as they did to their Silent Hill 2 remake, both the studio and game could be poised to be the next big thing in survival horror.
Set to land on the PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC platforms, Cronos: The New Dawn currently holds a vague 2025 release window.