'We proved people wrong:' After Silent Hill 2, Bloober Team's survival horror developers are no longer 'feeling like underdogs all the time'

Guy looking in mirror
(Image credit: Konami)

"Give us a chance," horror studio Bloober Team asked Silent Hill fans last summer.

Before Silent Hill 2's remake racked up critical acclaim on release, the developers at Bloober Team spent two years working under the Sauron-like eye of a fandom that had weathered far too many disappointments, and a horror audience that saw Bloober's past horror games as insufficient evidence it could nail a remake of one of the genre's all-time greats.

That distinction has been important for the morale of the developers at the Polish studio, Cronos game director Jacek Zięba told PC Gamer in a recent interview.

Zięba said that Bloober Team is in a "different position" after Silent Hill 2's success, with players more interested in what it's doing. For my part, I'm glad to see the studio returning to its favorite setting with Cronos: The New Dawn, the studio's home city of Kraków—though with a blend of sci-fi disaster and '80s Soviet aesthetics.

Best MMOsBest strategy gamesBest open world gamesBest survival gamesBest horror games

Best MMOs: Most massive
Best strategy games: Number crunching
Best open world games: Unlimited exploration
Best survival games: Live craft love
Best horror games: Fight or flight

"We're in a different moment," Zięba said. "I think we're riding the wave of people being intrigued, and we need to deliver. We know we need to deliver. We put our hearts into all our games, and we do whatever we can to make it the best."

Cronos's lead writer Grzegorz Like chimed in that the team still wants to improve after Silent Hill 2.

"Every time you publish a game, you learn, and then you change, you evolve. You try to be better. I swear to god, we want to be better—even after Silent Hill," he said. "People were like 'this is perfection!' This is not perfection."

"Or maybe it is," countered Zięba. "We also like to say that with Silent Hill and Cronos, it's like two pizzas with different toppings. Even if we created one perfect one, maybe now we can show you a different one."

Cronos: The New Dawn is out later this year.

Wes Fenlon
Senior Editor

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.


When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).

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