Cronos: The New Dawnis a survival horror game that brings in the best of the genre while introducing its own take on psychological horror. Beyond that,Cronos: The New Dawn’s gameplayrevolves around the unique mechanic of merging, where enemies can consume the corpses of others to become bigger and harder-to-defeat monstrosities. Combined with Bloober Team’s pedigree for horror, it seems the upcoming title could be something special.
Game Rant recently spoke withCronos: The New Dawnlead writer Grzegorz Like, co-director Wojciech Piejko, and co-director Jacek Zieba about making the game authentic, embracing change as a core theme, and otherwise making every facet of the game rely on strong survival horror tactics.The following transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
How Bloober Team Puts Authenticity into a Fictional Horror Game
Q: You’ve spoken a bit about how you grew up here and this place is your home, so I wanted to ask what it’s like to be channeling your home into a video game?
Like:Well, it’s very exciting, and it wasn’t like it was my proposition. It wasn’t like the ego speaking, saying to do this in my place. It was a conscious, artistic decision by the guys who came to me and said, ‘We’re making a new game. Let’s set it in Krakow again, but this time, let’s do it in Nowa Huta because it’s appealing to the art style we decided for the game." I was like, ‘Great.’ We can tell a lot of stories that are connected to how people were in the old days here with their various struggles, so we really had an opportunity to speak about it.
I think when you approach an idea and you put a real place in it, it benefitsthe game with authenticity. You can pass a little bit of yourself into that game, and when I am speaking about this place, I’m speaking truth. And people like truth. Again, it was very important for the themes of the game that it be set here because, as you know, Silent Hill was a game that really delved into the depths of human psychology. We wanted to speak on a grander scale about a society, and this town really becomes a character. We can go from that to more philosophical themes like society, the end of society, time, and all that, and I think it’s a great background for those types of questions when you enter The New Dawn.
Q: As co-directors, can you tell me about how the two of you worked together to bring this game to life?
Piejko:It’s like making a game with a friend, which is awesome. We fuel each other, and we are the same—but different. We can fill each other’s gaps, and we even teamed up onThe Medium. After that game, they allowed us to finally create asurvival horror game, which we both love so much. It’s our favorite genre of games. It’s a dream come true to make a game you love with a friend.
Zieba:We’ve worked together for eight years overall, and it really is a duet. It’s funny when people know…
Like: People sometimes think they are each other.
Zieba: Yeah, like a Hive Mind. We finish each other’s sentences like twins. It also makes our decisions a little more bulletproof because we can check them with each other…
Piejko:…and sometimes challenge each other, which pushes the game forward. They say it’s lonely at the top, so it’s good to have someone to back you.
Zieba: We can also cover more, working with different departments at the same time.
Piejko:Yeah, we can spread our duties, and when designers ask me what to do, I know when he’s already said yes.
Like: I often try to do the thing where you go to your father, he says no, so you go to your mother. That doesn’t work with them.
Don’t Let Them Merge
Q: One of the big things for Cronos is Merging. Part of me came in thinking that I wanted to see how much I could let them merge and how long I could survive. Not for very long, it turns out. How did you come up with merging, and what does it add to the survival horror aspect of Cronos?
Piejko:When we started Cronos, we wanted a mechanic that would define our game and make it stand out from other survival horror games. Of course, Dead Space has that awesome mechanic for cutting off limbs, andAlan Wake has the flashlight. We thought we needed something cool to distinguish our game, and I think the spark was John Carpenter’s The Thing. Of course, I know it works differently, but that inspired us at the very beginning. At first, they were basically eating each other, but combat design said no because they stopped moving too much. We needed something else, and that’s where the technicals came in. It was a long process to design this, but once we had it, we built the entire game around it.
There is a limit on, let’s say, the evolution stages for when monsters merge. At some point, merging becomes a way for it to heal itself. But fun fact, in the prototype phase, we allowed the monsters to constantly merge and merge and merge. They grew so big that they couldn’t fit into doors, so we needed to cap them somewhere.
It made the game more tactical; it’s not just run and gun. Your tools are more important than your accuracy, using crowd control and making decisions. Should I burn this body or leave it? Maybe you use that flamethrower to stun enemies. It made the game cooler and much better.
Like:We also like it when different divisions of the game rhyme with each other, so we knew, as the writing team, that this would be big for the game. We needed to reflect the merging system in the themes of the story. It’s also a good time for this kind of story because, in the end, people want to be together. This is exactly what happens: they start to merge with each other. It’s just a complicated situation at the end of the world, and there’s a metaphysical sense to it: the hedgehog dilemma, where you want to be with people, but you hurt them in the process. We wanted to put some of that merging into the psychological element of the game, and we created this kind of weird horror cocktail.
Zieba: The bottom line: don’t let them merge. This is not something we want you to do.
Pieljko: Or you’ll make a small boss fight for yourself.
Zieba:Having fun and not letting them merge, that’s the sweet spot.
There was more than once where I knew a body was nearby, and I was trying to make sure the enemy didn’t get over there to it. I hear you.
Pieljko: Yeah, a big win for us was seeing playtesters become more afraid of merging than being hit. We’ve seen them drop everything to stop them from merging.
Accepting Change
Q: The Traveler doesn’t really have much of a personality; they’re just kind of making these mission statements: ‘Oh, we’ve got to find the predecessor. Gotta find Edward.’ I was kind of curious as to why you made this character more of a blank slate versus giving them a more identifiable personality?
Like: Because this is just the beginning. It’s a story about creating a personality. Her story will unfold more and more throughout the game.
Zieba: The traveler at the end of the game is completely different than at the beginning of the game.
Like: We knew that this was a gigantic risk to make her a blank slate at the beginning. People will go, ‘Okay, cool. I wanted to identify with the character, but I guess this is all right.’ People will accept that and lean more toward being professional body burners and all that, but then, ‘Oh, sh*t. There’s a story here.’
We can promise you that there are a couple of twists that will change how you perceive the concept of this game, at this point. It’s a completely different story at the end. It starts with a gigantic mission to save humanity, but it turns into this verypersonal and psychological space.
Zieba: She will change.
Like: She will change because change is unstoppable.
She will change. The Change. I see what you’re doing there.
Zieba: Yes, The Change is also one of the topics of the game and the speed of The Change. What do we do when we are afraid that something is changing? How does that push us to different decisions? I think all the characters in the game have something about accepting change.
Q: We don’t have a release date yet, but based on the current version of the game, how is the team feeling about it?
Zieba: F*cking cool. Yeah, good. Really good. This preview was also kind of a test. There’s always fear when you show your work to more than one person, and you’re able to see them playing. It’s a very different experience, but even before that, we were feeling like we were ready for it.
Pieljko: To be honest, there’s always this moment in development before you see players play your game—when all the ingredients come together: the music, the audio, the visuals, everything. It’s this moment where it clicks, and we are past this moment.
Zieba:There is a saying in game dev that you don’t finish games, you abandon them, and I think we are ready to abandon this.
[END]
