It seems like only yesterday that Konami announced Bloober Team would be developing the Silent Hill 2 remake, a decision that, while at first questioned by horror fans, soon seemed like the right call once players actually got their hands on the remake.
But Bloober Team couldn't just bask in the success of the Silent Hill 2 remake forever; no, there was a point during its development where it became clear that now was the time to move on to the next venture.
"It was awesome, because we did Silent Hill because we felt ready to do Silent Hill," lead writer Grzegorz Like tells me. "Then, when we were in production for Silent Hill, like two years in, we knew we needed to start developing this." This being Cronos: The New Dawn.
Set in the Kraków district of Nowa Huta after a deadly virus ravaged the population. Cronos: The New Dawn sees something called 'The Change' turn everyone infected into zombie-like creatures, which can mutate and merge to create even worse enemies. It's a step away from what the devs were working on in their previous project.
"Silent Hill is in every one of our games, because this is what moulded us as creators," Like says. "But we decided on more of an action angle, like Resident Evil." Cronos isn't as eerie as Silent Hill and leans more towards jumpscares than psychological horror, but that's intentional.
"We knew that this needed to be different," Like continues. "No more James Sunderland, running around the place with his wooden plank, this needed to be something else. We are not only horror fans, but we love everything sci-fi and 80s. So we decided, okay, let's treat ourselves. Let's make it us. Put Poland in it, the badass suit, time travel. What do you want? What do you like? Someone said cats? Okay, let's do cats." I did actually see a cat running around Nowa Huta during my preview, so as far as I've seen, Bloober Team has stayed true to all of these promises.
Cronos: The New Dawn seems ready to stand on its own. From what I played at Gamescom, it doesn't seem like a horror game that has taken a massive amount of inspiration from either Resident Evil or Silent Hill. That's not a final analysis, and how it will all hold up over the course of the full game is an open question for now. But it will be interesting to see how the story plays out, and whether players will be able to identify any shreds of Silent Hill DNA that managed to stick around after the remake.
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