2022’s The Callisto Protocol was being touted as the spiritual successor of the Dead Space franchise, but Bloober Team—the developers behind 2024’s Silent Hill 2 remake—have a whole new horror trip that feels a like it’s the new-gen Dead Space.
Cronos: The New Dawn is set to come out later this year, and we have a whole new look at the gameplay that will make your skin crawl.
Time Travelling Horror
The gameplay trailer for Cronos only lasts for two minutes, but it showcases enough footage to give players an idea just exactly how creepy (and gross) this game is expected to be. Check this out:
The press release for the game reads:
“Set across two time periods - the grim ruins of a post-apocalyptic future as well as in 1980s-era Poland—Cronos: The New Dawn thrusts players into the decaying district of New Dawn, inspired by real-life Nowa Huta. You play as a Traveller, an agent of the mysterious Collective, emerging from a dystopian future to dive back into time and extract key people before they perish in the apocalypse. As you explore a world on the brink of annihilation, you’ll encounter grotesque enemies known as the Orphans — twisted, body-horror monstrosities born from humanity’s darkest nightmares.”
Just looking at the gore and monsters in the trailer, it’s definitely enough to callback to the same kinds of monsters from Dead Space. Even the character of the traveller covered in his suit harkens back to DS’ Isaac (or BioShock’s Big Daddies).
While we’ve have to shoot at monsters right out of The Thing before, this game sets itself apart with Merge mechanics.
“Don’t Let Them Merge!”
As you can see in the trailer, downed enemies don’t stay down for long, and they eventually merge together to become a bigger, scarier murder demon . The core mechanic of the game is described, “If you don’t burn their bodies, these fallen monsters can be absorbed by existing enemies. Through a grotesque process known as Merging, enemies evolve into faster, stronger, more resilient, and far more horrifying abominations, gaining additional abilities in battle.”
Now that I think about it, the Orphans do also resemble clickers from The Last of Us in a way, and the fact that they can merge into a new monster calls back to the Rat King from The Last of Us Part II which is a big lumbering monter composed of many different infected people.
With a release date expected for this year, we should see more of Cronos in the next few months.
No specific release date has been revealed for Cronos: The New Dawn, but it is expected to launch for PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PS5 sometime later this year—hopefully in time for the Halloween season.