Here’s a new trailer for Cronos: The New Dawn, the Silent Hill 2 remake studio’s sci-fi horror shooter
Get in the video game, loser – we’re going to the future in order to shoot some tentacles in order to go to the past in order to save the future by soul-jacking people from 1980s Poland. Wait, let me rewind time and start afresh: here’s a new overview trailer for Cronos: The New Dawn, a sci-fi horror from Silent Hill 2 remakers Bloober Team. It’s got a Dead Space-style suit that makes you look like either an enormous fly or a sewn-up bottom (delete as appropriate), and some manky environments that recall Bloober’s last original production, The Medium. Quickly now, watch the trailer while I finish writing this article.
Phew, made it just in time! Announced last October, Cronos: The New Dawn takes place in a world marred by The Change, a cataclysm that appears to have reduced Earth to a spectral asteroid field. The remnants of humanity survive in fetching hexagonal glamping pods, while the ravaged cities are full of things with tendrils and teeth where the abdomens should be.
You play a “Traveller” working for the “Collective”, and your job is to search this fallen world for portals to 1980s Poland, where The Change is still taking hold. There, you must use your wholly unterrifying fold-out “Harvester” gauntlet to “extract the Essences” of people fated to die, allowing them to accompany you back to the future. Presumably this will be useful somehow.
This looks like Bloober’s most combative offering yet – a sizeable step up from the largely plank-based melee of the Silent Hill 2 remake. Your arsenal ranges from a reassuringly brick-sized handcannon to a shotgun, an automatic rifle and a weapon that appears to make things implode. It looks like there are a few terrain puzzles that involve time-rewinding. It’s not clear whether the bulk of the game is spent in the future, with the old-timey Poland bits serving as climactic interludes, or whether you’ll be running and gunning through the 1980s as well.
The thing that interests me most about Cronos is that it continues Bloober’s curious dissection of their own cultural context, as they unpack Poland from different temporal vantages by way of different horror subgenres. Their breakthrough cyberpunk chiller Observer took place in an apartment block in Kraków – Bloober’s home town. The Medium, which is set in 1999, begins in the same apartment block. I wouldn’t be surprised if the old lady’s home from the first Cronos: The New Dawn trailer was that very same apartment block again. Anyway, the new game is out this year and you can read more on Steam.
