With good horror, the kind that sticks in the mind, it’s always about something. That can be deeply personal; grieving a relative, trauma that changes you, a desire to instill a fear of clowns in anyone who reads your work. Cronos: The New Dawn is firmly in that school of thought.
The lead writer, Grzegorz Like, has spoken about the inspirations for Cronos. The team drew deeply from the well of history in Poland, centring on Like’s home town of Nowa Huta. Here, a grand steelworks acts as the central hub for its residents, all workers or people striving to work there. In the early 80s, martial law was imposed, creating a strict curfew and desolate streets. Like compared it to Gotham City.
Cronos also focuses on time travel in its narrative, as you jump from point to point and story to story. In this manner, there is a link created — the isolation of Nowa Huta under curfew, to the lockdowns of 2020. History is, as ever, recursive and circular. We still endure the scars, no matter how opinions split and fracture.
Cronos: The New Dawn is a well-crafted time-bending sci-fi survival horror
What changed five, nearly six now, years ago? Was it that long ago? Did you ever go out when you weren’t really meant to in the dark of the night just to see a city that normally rippled with life stand still? It was eerie, that solitude. A sense of shock and stasis as we all came to terms with exactly what was going on.
At least, I remember a feeling that the world had ended. This titanic wave of change crashing down all at once, debasing both time and people around it. Those first lockdowns felt endless, and now it feels so distant, yet so close. Like we can travel there from sketches of the lives we had in that moment.
Cronos probably isn’t explicitly about this pandemic, but it rings incredibly true as you trudge through isolated apartments rich with life cut short or stuck in that sense of static time. When you aren’t fighting tooth and nail against strange creatures, you explore these lives. You live in the history left behind.
Bloober Team has had many misteps, but appears to have struck gold with a specific thing in both Cronos and the remake of Silent Hill 2: No one does an abandoned apartment block better. The ennui, the comfort, the dichotomy of crappy buildings entombing beautiful life.
As established, time is a fluctuating, random thing. Scenes occur that you can only really pinpoint from the future, but they jut out like a blade and make a clear mark of importance. Bloober’s recent track record is exactly that, and reflective of two truths. One, that this is a studio that has firmly found its voice and is taking the steps to establish itself as a horror studio in its upper echelons. Two, that they have something to say. The future is bright.
Cronos is available now for PC, Xbox Series, PS5 and Nintendo Switch 2.
