Bloober Team has read the nasty tweets and it’s seen the videos in which skeptics brace for disappointment; it hasn’t ignored the pessimism. The Polish, horror-obsessed studio even admits it’s made “shitty” games in the past. Now, it’s out to prove Silent Hill 2 Remake wasn’t a one-hit wonder built from a trustworthy, pre-existing blueprint. Speaking with Bloober Team less than 24 hours after its newest horror game, Cronos: The New Dawn, was revealed during the latest Xbox Partner Preview, and just two weeks after the Silent Hill 2 Remake parade of praise kicked off, I learned the studio’s next project is intended to reinforce a newly emerging narrative: the Bloober Team redemption arc.
“We don’t want to make a similar game [to Silent Hill 2],” director/designer Wojciech Piejko told me during an interview focused on the team’s first post-Silent Hill project, which began to take shape a few months after The Medium was released in 2021. Though Cronos: The New Dawn and Silent Hill 2 Remake were being developed on overlapping timelines, they come from largely different teams within the studio and are meant to feel like “different pizzas with different toppings–both delicious,” he said with a laugh. Silent Hill 2 Remake was better than most seemed to expect, but Cronos: The New Dawn seeks to prove they can build something special from scratch, too.
The game centers on The Traveler, a mysterious person who moves through timelines. On one end is a future ravaged by a pandemic and inhabited by monstrous mutants. On the other end is communist Poland circa the 1980s. The Traveler is tasked with moving backward through time to rescue VIPs who didn’t survive, disrupting the timeline to bring them into the future where they may be able to help. If it sounds like things will get wonky in that classic time-travel way, I’d bet you’re right. The duo told me the game is inspired by Netflix’s Dark, a magnificent series that often felt like an oddly welcome headache for those trying to make sense of its elaborate plot.
Bloober Team’s next game is purposely hard to compare to Silent Hill 2 in setting and story. The team wants it to stand on its own.
Despite being built during the COVID era and involving a pandemic of its own, Cronos is not intended to be Bloober Team’s “big comment about COVID or something,” director/producer Jacek Zieba told me. “We were afraid of [the pandemic plot point] at the very beginning,” Piejko added, because it had felt like the worst of the pandemic era was behind them and they didn’t want to return to that headspace. They ended up keeping it in when it became clear to them that the story worked too well to discard it.
With Cronos being the team’s first original survival-horror IP, following years of horror games such as Layers of Fear and Observer, which were light on gamplay elements, the team feels like it’s ready for its next phase of evolution. Naturally, this is owed in part to its take on Silent Hill 2. “It helped in the case of technology,” Zieba said, “to jump from first-person to the third-person camera [with] ranged combat and other stuff. So the basis [for Cronos] when we started in pre-production was there [thanks to] the Silent Hill team.”
From there, though, the team sought to go in a starkly different direction, partly to avoid any finer comparisons between its remake project and its original IP. It landed on a sci-fi horror that moves through time and space, but the pair of games do remain linked in one other vital way: Bloober Team hopes Cronos can be the “second punch” of a two-hit combo for the team, said Zieba, likening the studio to a victorious underdog. “Nobody believed we could deliver, and we delivered. That was a big honor, that we, as Bloober, could work with Silent Hill and Konami. As horror creators, we love Silent Hill, like, I think, most horror fans [do.]”
Still, the entire staff was keenly aware of the tenor of the internet’s criticism surrounding the Silent Hill 2 remake and the studio as a whole. When the team was revealed as the developer of Konami’s major revival project, much of the online reaction was pessimistic or skeptical. People felt Bloober Team wasn’t cut out for the job, not having made true survival-horror games before, and thus never having shown it could build out deeper mechanics like inventory management and combat. Eventually, the company put out a statement aimed at the general public in which it asked for patience as it worked on Silent Hill 2, all while the people inside the company were unable or unwilling to block out the noise.
Hints of Poland’s communist-era brutalist architecture can be seen in this shot, which presumably is set in the game’s future timeline.
“It was tough for those couple of years before [Silent Hill 2’s] release,” he said, but added that the remake team was tough, too, for not letting it get under their skin. “They made it. We made it. Bloober made it. And now, it’s very good spirits inside [the studio.] We want to show what we can do on our own, how we can evolve our ideas.”
“They recreated a legendary game,” Piejko said of his colleagues on the remake team. “They made the impossible possible, and it was a bumpy road because of all the hate on the internet. The pressure was big on them, and they delivered, and for the company, it’s an amazing moment.”
The team previously stated it considers 2016’s Layers of Fear the studio’s rebirth, when it pivoted from aimlessly making immensely panned games like Basement Crawl to instead focusing on horror games, even if they weren’t yet the kind of horror games some players, and even some developers, were satisfied with. Layers of Fear put Bloober Team on the map, but people inside the studio understood that wasn’t its final form. Silent Hill 2 Remake is seen as the start of “Bloober Team 3.0,” as the best-reviewed game in the company’s history. Now, the team is hoping Cronos can demonstrate a more homegrown shift into a proud new era for the studio, backed by the optimistic reception to the unveiling of Cronos: The New Dawn.
When Cronos was revealed, “we all felt relief,” Piejko revealed. “All the comments were like, ‘Yeah, this looks great. I love the design of the character.'” To him and others, it was uplifting to see how the perception of the studio is already noticeably changing. Despite all the pressure of Silent Hill 2 Remake, there’s arguably still plenty bearing down on the team as it seeks to prove it can conjure magic entirely of its own, but the directors told me this genre is where they want to be, and they’re willing to prove they have what it takes.
As fans of Netflix’s Dark, Bloober Team told me a good sci-fi story should feel earned; a little homework for the audience is a good thing.
“We want to be a horror company,” Zieba told me. “We want to find our niche, and we think we found our niche, so now we just–let’s evolve with it. […] And how that happens is more complex, but it also happens organically in a way, like with [2016’s] Layers of Fear, people in the studio were like, ‘Okay, we made some shitty games before, but we [can] evolve.”
“We gathered a team that loves horror,” Piejko added. “So I think, for us, it would not be easy to switch [to other genres], and we don’t want to.”
Cronos: The New Dawn arrives on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S in 2025.
