If you’ve found yourself pondering the time-travel terrors teased in Bloober Team’s Cronos: The New Dawn reveal trailer last October, you might be intrigued to hear the Silent Hill 2 Remake studio has now shared further details in a new developer diary. That’s alongside the reveal of I Hate This Place – an open-world survival horror game it’s publishing later this year.
Cronos: The New Dawn, as we previously learned, follows the adventures of the enigmatic Traveler as they journey between a monster-infested post-apocalyptic future – created after a cataclysmic event known as the Change – and 1980s Poland. Now, though, Bloober has talked a little more about its upcoming sci-fi horror – which is said to draw inspiration from the likes of John Carpenter’s The Thing, mind-pummelling German TV series Dark, 12 Monkeys, Dead Space, and even a touch of Dark Souls in terms of its challenge.
As for Cronos’ enigmatic lead, the Traveler is just one of a group – described as ‘divers in time’ – sent to explore the ruins of human civilisation in search of time rifts. These enable them to extract people from the past who didn’t survive the apocalypse. In Cronos’ alternative timeline, the world ended in the ’80s – thanks to the aforementioned Change – and the resulting wasteland is populated by monstrous creatures known as The Orphans.
These are the remnants of humanity, and can take different forms, each with distinctive abilities. What connects each variant, however, is the fact they’re all still made of human tissue, introducing an element of body horror reminiscent of The Thing. Additionally (as per Bloober’s not entirely serious closing Q&A), players can expect walls of flesh, face-punching melee combat, “kinda” flamethrowers, dismemberment of sorts, and aliens (“maybe”). And ladders.