Cronos: The New Dawn interview - pandemic horror sees Bloober Team go global

Survival horror fans have been able to ignore Poland’s Bloober Team for a while, but not anymore. Silent Hill 2’s 2024 remake was one of the best games of the year, and the most critically acclaimed game Bloober Team has ever made. Layers of Fear didn’t hit the spot, and The Medium’s critical reception was, well, medium, but Silent Hill 2 was unignorable. 

Anyone paying attention saw this coming from a mile off. 2015’s Layers of Fear managed to capture attention by positioning itself as a spiritual successor to Hideo Kojima’s own Silent Hill project, P.T., and from that success the team moved from strength to strength. Silent Hill 2 was always going to be the best Bloober Team game, and Cronos: The New Dawn might be the next best Bloober Team game — certainly its best original work. 

I made the journey to Kraków, Poland, to meet with the key developers behind Cronos, and was finally able to sit down with them inside Nowa Huta’s abandoned steelworks. In Soviet Poland, Nowa Huta and the steelworks were to be a comfortable place for the workers of Kraków to live and work close to the city centre. In the modern day, the steelworks have fallen silent, and instead the offices and underground shelter have become a tourist destination for foreigners eager to see the remnants of the Soviet Union in Poland.

The huge office building is adorned with opulent marble pillars and switchboards equipped with tape reels evoke a hybrid of classical aesthetics and ‘70s-era futurism. Each large, grandiose room stands frozen in time and silent, while decades ago it was a hub for the entire city, hosting some of history’s most famous names, like Fidel Castro, Vladimir Lenin, and Josip Tito.

But instead of those famous figures, in one of the complex’s dozens upon dozens of side rooms, I found Wojciech Piejko, Jacek Zięba, and Grzegorz Like, three key developers on Cronos: The New Dawn. The trio were sitting on an old sofa in a small room with an incredibly high ceiling. A CRT sits in the corner showing nothing but static, and the room is lit with red bulbs, fitting the game’s aesthetic. This is once where people would live and work, and the cozy vibes are at once disarming and disquieting. This homely space doesn’t feel like it should exist within Nowa Huta’s steelworks — and it’s this kind of mundane, familiar horror that Bloober Team specializes in.

Layers of Fear was a walking sim by the team’s own admission, but you’ve got to learn to walk before you can sprint down corridors looking for handgun ammo. “A lot of people think that you choose to make a walking sim,” narrative designer and lead writer on Cronos, Grzegorz Like, explains. “But honestly, I think it's a matter of resources, and when you grow, you're ready for the Silent Hills, the Cronoses.” 

“With Bloober, its history is ‘from zero to hero’, I feel,” co-game director Wojciech Piejko tells me. “Before The Medium and even before the horror era, Bloober started as a smaller company, and with each game we were learning. The company was struggling at the beginning, and Layers of Fears was a breakthrough for the company and the first big hit for us.

“Layers of Fear was a walking simulator, then with Observer we added characters and dialogue options — it’s a bigger game. We did Layers of Fear 2 and Blair Witch, then The Medium moved to third-person camera perspectives. It all led us to the moment when we were ready to make Silent Hill 2, and now Cronos. All of those steps have pushed us forward.”

Bloober Team’s rise came right alongside the COVID-19 pandemic, and while Cronos: The New Dawn does feature a pandemic, it was purely coincidental. “It’s something we realized after, like ‘oh f**k, we are making a game about a pandemic.’ We didn’t intend it, that wasn’t the idea,” Zięba explains. “I think, subconsciously, we may have gone through some kind of therapy by including that. We know it lands as it lands, but [it’s not a game about COVID]. There will be some themes – it’s horror, we are touching on that – but it’s not a game about that. It’s a game about change — even symbolic change.”

That doesn’t mean COVID-19 didn’t impact Bloober Team, though. A global shift toward hybrid and remote working introduced fresh and experienced talent to Bloober that wouldn’t have worked on Silent Hill 2 and Cronos otherwise. “The pandemic also helped us, because the games industry in Poland was growing, but without the people that are working remotely right now, I think we wouldn’t be in the place we are right now.

“We hired people not just from Poland, but from Europe and so on. This really levelled us up as developers.”

Bloober Team’s release schedule has been busy since Layers of Fear launched a decade ago. There are three Layers of Fear games, Observer, Blair Witch, and The Medium all preceding Silent Hill 2 in that ten year span, and development of a remake of the first Silent Hill has already been confirmed. The development of each of those games inform the design of the next game going forward. For example, Silent Hill’s existence pushed the team to make Cronos more sci-fi.

“We know that Silent Hill is there, and we have a second team working on it at this time,” Zięba tells us. “We knew we needed to do something different, so we went to sci-fi, the Merge system, a more action-heavy approach, and other stuff to just make the game different and crazy so we can start our own IP. But mostly our approach was to stick to our guns from the beginning.”

Piejko explains that Bloober’s two internal teams are like “cogs in the machine,” able to work on games simultaneously. “When one game is closer to being finished, we’ll transfer people to the other project, and then the small core team stays to create new pitches, new ideas, and handle pre-production,” Piejko continues. “We are constantly transferring knowledge because the people that were making Silent Hill 2 are now working on Cronos, and we will help them, and so on and so on.”

Cronos: The New Dawn is Bloober Team’s biggest and most expensive self-published venture yet, and the Silent Hill remake is in development right now, but Bloober is already looking toward the future. Before I left the trio to their comfy couch and their next interview, I told them that I assumed Bloober Team already had plans for the next original game, and Zięba simply said, “I’m assuming maybe you’re right.”