Cronos

If you pine for the rotting corridors and tactical limb-surgery of Dead Space, it looks like Bloober’s upcoming Cronos: The New Dawn may have you covered. Fresh from revealing that they’re remaking the first Silent Hill, the Polish team have released a new trailer for Cronos that shows off more of its bubble-suited third-person gunnery.

In particular, it spotlights the Merge mechanic, whereby guttural tendril beasts known as Orphans devour the corpses of their brethren to enhance their abilities. It’s implied that they can do this more than once, so be sure to clean up after yourself. As in so many other walks of life, punctual incineration may be the cure.

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I find the trailer interesting for a couple of reasons. The simpler draw is that, yes, this sure does reek of Dead Space, my beloved. In particular, the Merging mechanic calls to mind those awful Necromorph facehugger equivalents who’d scuttle around reanimating cadavers. And let’s not forget the crawling arms and legs that’d sneakily join up into a Biggermorph if left unattended. How I hated them. Can’t fault the animation, though. Excellently horrible.

The other reason that interests me is that it’s continuing a theme for Bloober, a developer who love to tell stories about torturously overlapping dimensions. Observer – Bloober’s best game to date, for my money – explored the familiar cyberpunk premise of ailing flesh and masonry corrupted by digital technology. The Medium gave you a splitscreen view of 90s Poland and an adjoining fungal purgatory inspired by Zdzisław Beksiński’s surrealist landscapes. And in Cronos: New Dawn, you’re an agent of the “Collective” alternating between a shattered post-apocalypse and the 1980s, your job being to digitise and extract lost souls from the past for safe archiving in the future. All of this reflects Bloober’s creative debts to the Silent Hill series, with its parallel realities.

Those themes extend into a mechanical focus on the implications of blending things or splitting them apart. In Observer, the splicing of digital and non-digital realms produces a grating, fizzy nightmare, to be forensically dissected using your bionic eye. In The Medium, you’ll cut through seams of flesh with an icky razor even as you try to reconcile the architecture of the mundane and the otherworldly. And in Cronos, you have to worry about merging enemies, which seems to parody the Collective’s goal of recovering and pooling the electronic spirits of the long-dead.

I realise this is quite fast-and-loose analysis, but in my defence, I am writing up a 90 second trailer in the fateful closing moments of the working day, racing against the sunset to finish a piece, and it was either this or waxing lyrical about gunfeel. Cronos: The New Dawn is out later this year on Steam and Epic Games Store.

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