Bloober Team’s Homework is on Clear Display With One of…

After last year's well-received and highly successful Silent Hill 2 Remake, Cronos: The New Dawn marks developer Bloober Team's newest foray into third-person survival horror. Following up the remake of such a beloved and seminal psychological horror classic, Cronos: The New Dawn is the studio's newest IP, and it takes inspiration from other well-known genre games like Dead Space and Resident Evil 4. Like all of those titles, Cronos: The New Dawn is a tense survival horror experience, and it sends fans on a harrowing mission across two distinct timelines in a desperate effort to find a cure for The Change–a devastating pandemic-like event that ravaged human civilization in the past.

Cronos The New Dawn screenshot subway station

Cronos: The New Dawn is set in an alternate history within Kraków, Poland's Nowa Huta district and its surrounding areas. Bloober Team itself is actually based out of Kraków, and it has long had a history of incorporating the location's appearance and flavor in its previous original works. Cronos: The New Dawn continues this tradition and arguably reflects Bloober's penchant and skill for rendering the architecture and intrinsic feel of this region to the highest degree yet.

Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher developer, CD Projekt Red, is also headquartered in Poland, but in the city of Warsaw.

Bloober Team's Specialty in Depicting Brutalist Eastern European Settings is on Full Display in Cronos: The New Dawn

Cronos The New Dawn screenshot neon store sign in snow

Bloober Team is No Stranger to Creating Games Set in its Home Turf

While the story, characters, and mechanics of some of Bloober Team's earlier games were thought to be a bit uneven or undercooked in cases, one positive aspect they all shared in common was their visual design and atmospheres. For example, 2020's Observer is set in a cyberpunk dystopia in Kraków during the year 2084 (a nod to the game's heavily 1984-inspired tale), taking place over the course of a single night in a dingy futuristic apartment complex. The place is inhabited by often bizarrely behaving residents, many of whom are hiding disturbing secrets. The game world itself was incredibly claustrophobic, with the twisting maze-like layout of the tenement building acting almost like its own character.

Following Observer, Bloober released The Medium, which is set in Poland's post-Communism period of the late 90s. Protagonist Marianne must explore the region's abandoned facilities to uncover the truth about her past and psychic abilities. Cronos: The New Dawn shares much of its DNA with both titles in terms of setting, with Bloober going for an unapologetically bleak rendering of Kraków during the 1980s this time around, coupled with a future landscape that is even more harrowing.

Cronos The New Dawn screenshot missing persons poster

Cronos: The New Dawn is Bloober Team's Most Impressive Eastern European Horror Setting So Far

Cronos The New Dawn screenshot shattered steel mill

From the moment players are set loose in Cronos: The New Dawn's apocalyptic wasteland, the oppressive look and feel of its Eastern European Brutalist-inspired world is instantly on display and never really lets up the entire time. The protagonist, known only as the Traveler, must make their way through the shattered remains of Nowa Huta's residential areas, searching for strange time anomalies that will transport them back to the past right as The Change occurred in the hopes of somehow stopping it altogether.

Cronos New Dawn official Traveler in ruins time warp in sky-1

Cronos: The New Dawn's setting and art design in particular remain equally stunning and eerily haunting in both timelines throughout the experience. As fans explore the ruined remains of depressing and decaying apartment blocks and places like a nearby steel mill, the layers of grime, blood, and dust that coat nearly everything make it all feel fully lived-in and believable, especially given the nature of the story and its more outlandish horror/sci-fi inclusions.

And while this may not necessarily be anything that seasoned fans of survival horror games haven't generally seen before in terms of original spaces, Cronos: The New Dawn's world is built and presented with a clear level of care and intimate working knowledge of its real-life counterpart. Given Bloober Team's admitted familiarity with, affinity for, and expertise in rendering their homeland within game worlds, this element shines through again in Cronos: The New Dawn, and could easily be said to be the studio's most fully-realized and striking setting of this nature to date.

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