When the Silent Hill 2 remake proved to be so good, some have been gradual to offer Bloober Group a lot credit score, citing the way it had a robust blueprint to construct from. It is true that Konami’s landmark unique is pretty much as good a place to begin as any, and Bloober Group’s earlier works have been typically met with blended evaluations at best–the team hasn’t shied away from its history. To me, it was nonetheless a tall process to stay as much as a recreation that so many maintain so expensive. However in the event you rely 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 like that recreation.
Again in October of final yr, Bloober Group informed me that it is in all probability all the time going to be a studio that makes horror video games, and at Summer time Recreation Fest Play Days 2025, the group made it clear that it needed to seek out its personal gameplay hook with its subsequent mission. It checked out Useless House’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 ready each earlier than and after an epidemic wipes out a lot of humanity, the locations you discover are sometimes house to a large number of lifeless 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 several sizes and shapes. Some are armored, others shoot acidic puke at you. Some fling slimy, crimson tentacles towards your face.
Any one in all these could be formidable, however the recreation’s merge system permits enemies to mix right into a single being, stack a number of talents without delay, and basically change into boss battles of the participant’s personal negligence. To do that, enemies will merely transfer towards a physique and take in it, inheriting its talents. 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 informed me that in testing the sport, the group initially did not put any restrictions on what number of occasions enemies may merge, giving beginning to towering monstrosities that turned too massive to slot in doorways at occasions. Now, the sport may have some restrictions on that system, like enemies that do not merge, and naturally, correct boss battles are sometimes siloed in a managed atmosphere. 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 on the lookout for.
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 gas, and this can be a horror recreation, so you’ll be able to wager that is a tricky commodity to return by. From that, robust moment-to-moment selections shall 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 gas to offer your self some respiratory room in a combat 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 seemed tough in the way in which it ought to, with headshots laborious to tug off on enemies–even when these enemies had a number of heads. The exploration was filled with basic survival-horror tropes that I admittedly have not grown sick of: locked gates needing boltcutters, environmental puzzles that pressure cheap definitions of lived-in areas, and even a protected room with its personal piece within the soundtrack. Notes and audio logs stuffed 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 have been developed in tandem for some time and by totally different groups throughout the studio, it seems like the teachings Bloober Group realized from Silent Hill 2 are on show. Its time-twisting story has me actually to see extra, and the combination of survival-horror fight and exploration, whereas acquainted, seems to be actually good from this distance. I all the time err on the facet of warning after I’ve seen solely a portion of a a lot bigger recreation I will play in full later, however I additionally really feel compelled to state that Cronos: The New Daybreak may very effectively cement a brand new, extra hopeful narrative round this studio.
