CRONOS: THE NEW DAWN

Kraków-set horror dripping with Soviet paranoia

- Wes Fenlon

Jacek Zięba reaches for his temple as he recalls the moment he realised Bloober's sci-fi horror game, set in alt-history Poland after a deadly outbreak, was about Covid. "We didn't want to make a game about the pandemic," the game director says. "When we started the story, it just worked for us. And at some point in the production, it was like, damn... we made something about the pandemic."

It was subconscious, Zięba says. Cronos: The New Dawn is rooted in the troubled history of post-WWII Kraków and the toll that life in the Soviet Union took on its people during the Cold War, a consistent theme in Bloober Team's games prior to last year's celebrated Silent Hill 2 remake. The sci-fi twist is that some sort of plague struck Kraków in the 1980s, wiping out much of the population and leaving the city to decay for decades until you arrive.

The plague also created a bunch of shambling guts-on-the-outside mutants jealous of your guts-on-the-inside vanity, and they all require a few explosive rounds to the head. It's a videogame, after all.

AN OLD-FASHIONED PLAGUE Lead writer Grzegorz Like says that he finds he's "more honest" when he writes about the people and places he knows intimately. "We discovered that it really enforces the questions we want to ask, and the themes. We overthrew communism and the regime by uniting, but now we want to ask you, 'What if uniting and being close was the thing that destroyed the world? What then?' We wanted the characters to have difficult decisions, and the setting enforces the drama and important questions.