Silent Hill 2 turned Bloober from a so-called walking sim graveyard to a studio worthy of being buried next to the biggest names in horror, and its next collaboration with Konami – a remake of the first Silent Hill from 1999 – could take the developer even further. But Silent Hill is a cloud with a big shadow, and Bloober wants its newest original game to live outside of it.
Just don’t expect it to be sunny. Cronos: The New Dawn is as dusty, mist-sprayed, and sorrowful as the most prototypical Silent Hill game, a quality director Jacek Zięba suggests to me comes from the fact that “there is something in all our horrors” that reference the Silent Hill series, and Silent Hill 2 in particular.
“When Silent Hill [2 remake] was in production,” says lead writer Grzegorz Like, “we really wanted to do that since forever.”
“The philosophy of approaching the story of psychological horror is in all our games,” Zięba, who also produced Bloober’s 2021 game The Medium, reiterates. But with Cronos, “we also go into more philosophical horror.”
Like explains that Bloober couldn’t take the same approach to Cronos as it took with Silent Hill 2 because, well, “James is a completely different character” to Cronos’ Traveler protagonist. I guessed as much while playing Cronos during a recent hands-on experience in California, where I spent two hours with the stony Traveler – and got to know her as intimately as I could from the outside of her head-to-toe, leaden spacesuit.
Whereas Silent Hill 2’s James wills himself to be oblivious, confused, and irresponsible – prompting the past 24 years of fans to imagine him doing things like white boy breakdancing – the Traveler is unshakeable. Nothing phases her. She’ll burn a body or heal a time rift between the desolate future and Soviet Poland – when Cronos’ mysterious Change seems to have first come – without hesitation; the Traveler welcomes the apocalypse in monotone.
Bloober’s interpretations of Silent Hill and Cronos will invariably play “differently because of that,” says Like, “because the gameplay supports [the protagonist]. We needed to invent something different.”
“Definitely, there is pressure,” Zięba says about releasing a new Bloober IP in the wake of Silent Hill 2, its shadow now seeming to stretch over his face as we talk. “Are we feeling it? I think a little. But also, after Silent Hill 2 remake, a lot of stuff changed.”
