When the Silent Hill 2 remake proved to be so good, some had been gradual to provide Bloober Staff a lot credit score, citing the way it had a robust blueprint to construct from. It is true that Konami’s landmark authentic is nearly as good a place to begin as any, and Bloober Staff’s earlier works had been typically met with combined critiques at best–the team hasn’t shied away from its history. To me, it was nonetheless a tall job to dwell as much as a recreation that so many maintain so pricey. However if you happen to depend your self amongst those that are ready to see if the Polish group can do it once more, and with one thing solely of its personal creation, Cronos: The New Daybreak is beginning to appear to be that recreation.
Again in October of final yr, Bloober Staff instructed me that it is in all probability all the time going to be a studio that makes horror video games, and at Summer season Sport Fest Play Days 2025, the group made it clear that it needed to search out its personal gameplay hook with its subsequent mission. It checked out Useless Area’s fight that drove gamers to chop off limbs and Alan Wake’s manner of stripping enemies of their “shields” utilizing gentle sources, and it knew it did not need its subsequent recreation to be a easy point-and-shoot horror recreation. From that steering, the “merge system” was born.
As a result of the time-traveling horror story is about each earlier than and after an epidemic wipes out a lot of humanity, the locations you discover are sometimes residence to a large number of useless our bodies. Issues fell aside quick, and what’s left of individuals have typically been morphed into “orphans,” the sport’s identify for its enemy monsters. These grotesque brutes come in numerous sizes and styles. Some are armored, others shoot acidic puke at you. Some fling slimy, crimson tentacles towards your face.
Any one in all these will be formidable, however the recreation’s merge system permits enemies to mix right into a single being, stack a number of skills directly, and primarily grow to be boss battles of the participant’s personal negligence. To do that, enemies will merely transfer towards a physique and take up it, inheriting its skills. The sport’s tagline, “Do not allow them to merge,” says all of it. Wojciech Piejko, the sport’s co-director who led me on the hands-off demo, jokingly made an identical level as he purposely allowed the monsters to develop for the sake of the demo. “This isn’t how it is best to play this recreation.”
Piejko instructed me that in testing the sport, the group initially did not put any restrictions on what number of occasions enemies may merge, giving delivery to towering monstrosities that grew to become too massive to slot in doorways at occasions. Now, the sport can have some restrictions on that system, like enemies that do not merge, and naturally, correct boss battles are sometimes siloed in a managed surroundings. However the recreation’s manner of permitting enemies to seep into each other and create super-enemies instantly felt just like the group had discovered the hook it was in search of.
Gamers may forestall these mergers from occurring by swiftly killing enemies, or much more proactively, by burning our bodies earlier than they reanimated, however your flamethrower, which you discharge like a round area-of-effect assault with a button press, requires gasoline, and it is a horror recreation, so you may guess that is a tricky commodity to return by. From that, robust moment-to-moment decisions might be made: Do you employ the flamethrower to preemptively dispatch the potential enemies earlier than they have been reborn, or do you save the flamethrower gasoline to provide your self some respiratory room in a struggle on your life?
Past the merge system, I noticed a recreation that was additional alongside in growth than I would anticipated, on condition that it was solely introduced lower than a yr in the past. The gunplay appeared tough in the way in which it ought to, with headshots arduous to drag off on enemies–even when these enemies had a number of heads. The exploration was filled with traditional survival-horror tropes that I admittedly have not grown sick of: locked gates needing boltcutters, environmental puzzles that pressure affordable definitions of lived-in areas, and even a secure room with its personal piece within the soundtrack. Notes and audio logs crammed within the backstory to a purposely confounding story impressed by Netflix’s Darkish. The third-person survival-horror gameplay definitely stands on the shoulders of video games and tales which have come earlier than it.
Though they had been developed in tandem for some time and by totally different groups inside the studio, it seems like the teachings Bloober Staff realized from Silent Hill 2 are on show. Its time-twisting story has me actually to see extra, and the combo of survival-horror fight and exploration, whereas acquainted, seems to be actually good from this distance. I all the time err on the aspect of warning after I’ve seen solely a portion of a a lot bigger recreation I am going to play in full later, however I additionally really feel compelled to state that Cronos: The New Daybreak may very nicely cement a brand new, extra hopeful narrative round this studio.