Cronos: The New Dawn is brutal pandemic horror: ‘Hard mode, in the old-school way’
The new gameplay trailer for Cronos: The New Dawn, out Wednesday from Bloober Team, debuts some tense gameplay featuring the protagonist — a time traveler with futuristic armor and an arsenal of weapons — facing off against misshapen, humanlike enemies with oozing, wiggling tendrils emerging from various parts of their bodies. I got to see even more at the Game Developers Conference in March, where I sat down with Jacek Zięba and Wojciech Piejko, who are co-directing the game at Bloober Team. And I can tell you one thing for sure: This game looks hard.I didn’t play Cronos myself; the preview was hands-off, so instead I was treated to watching Zięba play through a section of the game as his colleague Piejko told me about its time travel premise. The time-hopping happens across (at least) two distinct time periods — there’s the present time period wracked by a horrific, mutating pandemic that’s transformed many humans into monstrous beings, and then there’s the before times, when the pandemic was just starting up and people didn’t understand how bad it was going to get. The developers were purposefully vague about the rest of the story, though, citing their desire to avoid spoilers in response to almost all of my questions about it; they want players to experience the sci-fi narrative on their own when the game is ready. (Cronos does not yet have a firm release date, only a 2025 release window.)Throughout the play session, Zięba kept swearing under his breath, defeating difficult enemy after difficult enemy by the skin of his teeth. For your reference, readers, usually game developers are so good at the game they’re making that it’s a cakewalk for them to play, whether a reporter is observing them or not. But Cronos is purposefully tuned to be a difficult survival experience, and the developers want to keep it that way.Image: Bloober TeamImage: Bloober TeamImage: Bloober TeamImage: Bloober TeamWhen I asked them about an easy mode, both developers shook their heads and Zięba said, “It’s hard mode, in the old-school way.” “So there’s just the one mode?” I asked. “One mode,” he confirmed. “When you finish the game, we can unlock harder difficulty.”Naturally, FromSoftware’s games came up as a point of comparison during our conversation, but Zięba and Piejko told me Cronos is a lot more story-forward than those games; I didn’t get to see much of this in the gameplay-focused preview, but they explained the game has cutscenes and audio logs to listen to that will reveal more about its world. The developers also cited Resident Evil and Returnal as influences, as well as the Netflix show Dark and the movie 12 Monkeys — both time travel stories. When Zięba and Piejko pointed out the game’s setting — Poland, which is also where the devs are from — I asked if there were any historical events that players might want to know about if they aren’t already familiar with the country’s history. “We set it at the beginning of 1980 for various reasons,” said Zięba. In the early ’80s, the country was under martial law, and the same is true in the alt-history 1980s of Cronos — albeit not for the same reason. In Cronos, martial law is enacted “because there is a disease,” Zięba explained, “and the government [is] saying, No, it’s all right, everything is all right, just be at home, it’s cool, it’s OK.” But when the time-traveling protagonist goes back in time to before the pandemic went widespread — “a couple days before everything goes to shit,” as Zięba put it — they’ll learn more about what happened and why.Image: Bloober TeamBut again, in order to see that story, players will need to be very methodical and strategic while playing Cronos. One point of order came up in the newest trailer, which features this ominous sentence splashed across the screen: “Don’t let them merge.” That was also the number one tip that both developers told me to keep in mind when facing the game’s enemies. Basically, these creatures can merge together to create larger and more powerful versions of themselves, so if you see a monster approaching a nearby corpse lying on the ground, be very worried. The more they merge with each other, the more powerful the resultant creature is, and the more ammo it’s going to take to kill it — which is not good, because ammo is very, very scarce in this game.“The basic enemies, we call them doppelgangers,” explained Zięba. “They’re maybe made from two, three, four, five people — but they still think, I’m a person. So they look more human. But you can also fight with monsters that — they know they’re not a person. They look very different than these guys.”This “merge” mechanic was the first mechanic created for this game, and the entire game and story emerged from that concept. In the early days of the in-game pandemic, that was one of the first symptoms — “people starting to feel an urge to come together,” as Piejko put it. Eventually, that urge turned into the horrific merging that’s now on display in the apocalyptic timeline.Cronos: The New Dawn is not only a completely original IP, it’s also very specifically a single-player experience. “It’s how it should be,” declared Zięba. “I’m a bit tired by only live service stuff that, you know, try to catch me — not to engage me. [...] I think we are overtired — everybody, now — by live service stuff. And how we can carry the player, how we can — no! Just make a good game.”Bloober Team’s Cronos: The New Dawn is out in 2025 for PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X.See More: Cronos: The New DawnPlaystationPlaystation logoWindowsWindows logoXboxXbox logoExplore The Game
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