“We’ve stopped being allergic to Poland.” We talk to Bloober Team about Cronos: The New Dawn

During the Cronos: The New Dawn screening in Nowa Huta, I had the opportunity not only to play this survival horror-inspired game but also to interview the devs. We talked about the challenges, the Polish setting, and what the game brings to the table.

“We’ve stopped being allergic to Poland.” We talk to Bloober Team about Cronos: The New Dawn.

Cronos: The New Dawn, with its unique mix of retro sci-fi, social realism, and survival horror with echoes of Terminator and 12 Monkeys, promises to be a truly promising treat for genre fans. It has a few areas for improvement, as I mentioned in my impressions of the demo, but if the rest of the game lives up to the standard of the preview, there’s plenty to look forward to. During the event, we were given a tour of the surrounding area and dungeons, but most importantly, I had the opportunity to chat with Jacek Zieba (Co-Director), Wojciech Piejko (Co-Director), and Grzegorz Like (Lead Writer).

We chatted about the game’s difficulty, why productions set in Poland are so rare, and also about various aspects of the game’s mechanics and story. If you’re curious to find out, for example, how long it will take to complete Cronos or what the combat is like, you’ve come to the right place!

HS: The difficulty level in Cronos is pretty high. I enjoy getting my ass kicked by a game, but I’m wondering—will players be able to change the difficulty if they just want to experience the story?

Jacek Zieba: After finishing the game, you’ll be able to unlock a harder mode [laughs]. Overall, Cronos is meant to be a challenging game. We believe—though not blindly—that a big part of the fun comes from overcoming obstacles. That sense of satisfaction helped us capture a bit of that old-school vibe, which we mix with some new-school elements in other areas. That’s the approach we wanted for Cronos. There’s only one difficulty setting at the start. The game might feel a bit different at first, and you have to get used to it—but once you do, it should go smoothly. It’s similar to most Souls games, where the game isn’t actually as hard or complex as it seems in the beginning. But you jump into a Souls game already expecting it to be tough, you learn the mechanics, and then later you’re running around naked with a sword killing all the bosses.

Grzegorz Like: I think, like Jacek said, whenever people hear that a game is hard or challenging, they immediately think of FromSoftware games, which at some point completely reshaped how we think about difficulty in games. And that was super refreshing. But I’d say Cronos presents its challenge in a totally different way. If you come in well-prepared, make good use of your environment, and know where enemies are and how they behave, it’s going to get a lot easier. Most of the battle actually happens before the fight even starts.

Wojciech Piejko: The learning curve in Cronos goes something like this: you get dropped into a new world. It’s a survival horror, so it’s pretty intense. There are a bunch of new mechanics, like the merging of enemies, which changes up the gameplay. That makes the game more tactical, like Grzegorz said. Your pure aiming skills aren’t as important—what matters more is planning: when to use the right tool, when to set someone on fire. Once you get that, I think the game gets easier. Of course, if you mess up and let monsters merge, it gets tougher—but it’s kind of like in Souls games. You “git gud” and push through. Once you learn the systems and adapt to this different take on survival horror, it gets really satisfying.

JZ: We didn’t want to make a game that plays itself. Since this is a survival horror, the survival aspect is genuinely important to us. We wanted to go a bit old-school, like the developers of older titles, and just give players a real challenge—not through some ridiculous difficulty, but through figuring out how the system works. And for the hardcore players, who we assume will manage just fine with the base difficulty, there’s an even higher one. We designed it so you can truly test your skills.

WP: On the flip side, someone mentioned yesterday that at the start of the demo, we warned it would be tough—and then they only died once. So, no need to be scared. You just have to plan ahead!

Cronos: The New Dawn, Bloober Team, 2025

HS: Since we’re talking about difficulty—what about your own challenges? Was there a mechanic that took a long time to crack, either in terms of design or implementation? Something that really wore you out, but now it’s in the game and you’re proud of it?

JZ: I wouldn’t say it wore us out, but we definitely had a lot of fun with the Merge mechanic. We were creating something totally new, from scratch, without a direct reference point. Making it into a polished gameplay mechanic that could carry the game and adapt to each combat scenario was a real challenge.

WP: Yeah, we worked on it for a long time. Initially, the monsters would physically devour each other—literally, like ghouls sucking in other bodies. But then our combat design team came in and said that made them too static, and we had to change things up. So we added tentacles—which, in turn, became a technical challenge. That mechanic went through the most iterations, the most trial and error. For instance, in early prototypes, enemies could merge endlessly, and they’d grow so big they couldn’t fit through doors anymore. There was a breakthrough moment during external playtests, when we noticed that players were more scared of the monsters merging than of getting hit by them. And that’s when we knew it worked. From that point on, we felt like everything was finally falling into place.

HS: I noticed you can sort of play around the merge mechanic—like, if you time the flamethrower right and kill the monsters while they’re stunned and burning, you don’t have to ignite each one separately afterwards.

WP: That’s exactly what I meant—once you figure out these mechanics and discover all those little tricks, the game doesn’t feel all that hard anymore. You can burn enemies, position yourself with the right weapon to take down multiple at once. I often use the tactic of luring two of them into the same spot and then torching several bodies at once with one blast from the flamethrower.

GL: I love when a monster comes at me alive and tries to attack, so I light up a nearby corpse it wanted to eat—stuns the aggressor right away. Then I just finish the job with a bullet to the head.

WP: Tiny spoiler incoming: later on, you get a weapon upgrade that shows a little light when you aim at enemies. If it turns red, it means the monster’s low on health—so you can skip last-hits, for example. People who pick up on this stuff try to sync everything up and wipe out multiple enemies at once. Cronos really opens up strategically.

GL: The Traveler actually gets a bunch of new tools later on, but we couldn’t fit that into the demo segments you played.

HS: That’s awesome—because in a way, you’re already answering what I wanted to ask next: do the mechanics evolve, and how? I’ll just let you write this article yourselves. [laughs]

GL: Later on, we introduce new combat mechanics, but puzzle-solving also evolves. New puzzle types come in—one, two, three—and eventually everything clicks into place.

WP: Besides the flamethrower, later you can launch a fire mine, so you’re able to ignite someone from a distance or even plant it on a corpse—which I love doing. If a monster comes close, the mine detects it and explodes. And if it doesn’t trigger, you can just pick it up and save your resources. There are a ton of ways to play around within this system. It’s wild! [laughs]

The New Dawn, Bloober Team, 2025

HS: So tell me—how big is the game compared to what we played here?

JZ: Journalists at these demos are barely skimming the surface of the pool. They think, “hey, the water’s nice,” and maybe catch a glimpse of something more—but really, you’ve only seen a small slice. Things will shift quite a lot later on, both in terms of story and mechanics. There are many new locations coming too.

GL: We originally scoped Cronos at around 16 hours, but it probably ended up more like 21.

JZ: The more you explore and gather resources, the more confident you’ll feel.

HS: So theoretically, you could hit 30 hours?

GL and WP (together): Easily.

JZ: It’s possible—if someone literally licks every wall—but I’m not sure it’ll go quite that far. On the other hand, the game’s built in a way that encourages replaying. You’ve got New Game Plus, so now you can have more fun with your gear, try different strategies. There’s hard mode. The story is written in such a way that, sure, on your first run you’ll get the emotions and most of the plot—but if you didn’t look around much, it’ll hit differently next time. When you go for a second playthrough—kind of like in Silent Hill—you get more context, you start to understand everything, and you might have that “holy crap, the game actually told me this early on—I just didn’t get it!” moment.

GL: That’s 100% intentional. We took a bit of a risk to build a kind of dual-layer narrative. On your first run, you think you get what’s going on—but when you play Cronos again, suddenly you understand everything in a completely different way.

JZ: …Thinking about it now, yeah, it’ll definitely go over 20 hours. Maybe not quite 30—we didn’t want anyone to get bogged down and have the experience lose momentum.

WP: Extraction choices will be super important. Who do you take with you in your next playthrough? Different characters? That’ll determine whose stories you’ll discover. There’s a lot of stuff to uncover.

HS: It reminded me of Bastion. There, a single twist during the second playthrough completely recontextualized the story and the way you perceive time. And from what you’re saying here, Cronos will have a lot of those shifting elements—especially with the extractions.

JZ: Exactly. That’ll directly influence what kind of ending you get.

GL: I can guarantee you one thing right now. You’ve probably already formed an idea of what Cronos is—but once you finish the game, it’s going to be something else. You’ll end up telling your friends, “Just play it—I won’t say anything.”

WP: The game really starts to shift with each extraction. The souls inside you begin to haunt you, show you things—you start to hear them. That has a massive impact on the world and how you perceive everything. Today, we focused more on gameplay in the demo, but the story plays a huge role.

GL: We created this one character who’s super cold and militaristic at first…

HS: …Very socialist-realist!

GL: Totally. But, you know, over time, she evolves. And when we compare her in the early cutscenes to how she behaves by the end of the game, it’s a completely different story. It was a challenge, but one that really paid off.

HS: Speaking of the Traveler—I actually got the impression that we’re playing as the monster. Her mission feels morally ambiguous, and at first, she really reminded me of the Terminator.

GL: Great instinct.

WP: Yeah, she’s kind of like a Terminator. Starts out completely cold, but like we said, her personality begins to change as she starts interacting with people, as she starts jumping through time.

JZ: In general, we’re asking a lot of questions through her. Some people might resonate with her initial stance, and others might find her too detached. But the key is to see how she evolves—and with that, how your perception of her evolves as the story progresses.

GL: We also focused on making choices that give the player a chance to express themselves. If someone agrees with the more hardline approach, they’ll have that path. But if the player starts to feel conflicted, the game lets them express that, too.

HS: That sounds like you’ve really learned a lot from working on Silent Hill 2 Remake, which also had those gameplay-narrative choices that seemed subtle but ended up having huge emotional weight.

GL: Yeah, the truth is we were in a position at one point where we were ready to make that Silent Hill, and we also had the means to implement a lot of things we’d dreamed about for a long time in our own projects.

HS: Speaking of development—how hard was it to work with Unreal on Cronos, which is visually way more abstract and surreal than Silent Hill 2 Remake?

JZ: With The Medium and Observer, we developed a formula where you feel like everything’s realistically laid out, but at the same time, there’s still room to actually play. We keep our gameplay metrics in check—you move through the space the way we want you to. It’s all deliberate design, not just visual set dressing. If we simply recreated real-life proportions, everything would be way too cramped.

WP: We’ve been working with Unreal for years—since Observer, actually.

JZ: That’s 8 years of experience right there.

WP: We’re still learning, of course. Unreal Engine 5, which we’re using for Cronos, brings some new tools—like World Partition, which lets us create much larger, less corridor-like levels. The world streams in dynamically as you explore. That lets us build big locations, like when you step out into Central Square in New Dawn. Lumen and tools like that really help us do that.

JZ: We’ve also got some great specialists. We were already known for that with Layers of Fear—how much we managed to squeeze out of the engine. People were shocked when they found out we did that on Unity. They’d ask, “Wait, you can make a game that looks like this in Unity?”

WP: Back then, I wasn’t at Bloober yet—and even I was surprised it was Unity.

JZ: Exactly. Unity had a totally different reputation.

HS: …Like for ballooning save files.

JZ: [laughs] Yeah, but after Layers, we felt like we had hit Unity’s ceiling. That’s when we knew Unreal was the direction we wanted to go—it’s the engine that gives us more.

HS: What made you want to create a game that’s kind of retro in terms of gameplay? On one hand, Cronos has modern, unique mechanics—but on the other, it feels much closer to Dead Space or System Shock, in an era dominated by Souls-likes.

JZ: Cronos is our love letter to survival horror. We live and breathe this genre. So when we got the chance to make it, we mixed together a bunch of things—various mechanics and ideas that we personally get excited about—to create the kind of game we’d want to play.

GL: It wasn’t some marketing move, like: “Oh, there’s a gap in the horror market, let’s fill it.” Bloober is basically a neighborhood horror fan club. We came in and just wanted to make something cool. We asked ourselves: what would be something fresh for the survival horror genre? Like—how about a new IP? There’ve been a ton of remakes lately, and yeah, we were involved in that too. So yeah, it’s a bit of a paradox—but whatever. I think deep down, we just really wanted to make something that’s truly ours.

JZ: It’s like trying to catch two birds with one stone. We refresh some things—and we’ve proven we’re good at that—but we also want to bring something new to the genre and explore it differently.

WP: We have two core teams working in parallel—so when one game wraps up, some devs move over to the next project, and a smaller group starts prototyping something new. When Cronos kicked off, the other team was already working on the Silent Hill 2 remake. So we knew we couldn’t make something too similar—we had to go in a different direction. More action-driven, more gameplay-oriented. We made conscious decisions to, for example, limit inventory like in Resident Evil, go with a sci-fi setting—but not in space—just to stand out.

JZ: Honestly, we just really wanted to make this game. We actually built a new, slightly different team for it. Everyone got super into the vision—we showed them what we had, and people believed in it.

HS: Speaking of inventory—it’s very restrictive. Weren’t you worried it might overwhelm players?

GL: You can upgrade it.

HS: I saw that—with those cores. Kind of like in the Doom Slayer suit. And the suit here also kind of feels like a character, right?

All three: That’s right!

The New Dawn, Bloober Team, 2025

HS: From my perspective, it seems like you’re not only making the horror game you want to play—but you’re also one of the few big studios that’s not afraid to go all-in on Polish atmosphere, and put serious money behind it. You can really see it on screen. Outside your studio, Holstin recently popped up—so I’m wondering, what keeps pushing you in that direction?

JZ: Holstin looks really promising, very interesting. We didn’t plan it this way, but at this point, we’ve become sort of specialists in bringing a Polish atmosphere into video games. We’re constantly figuring out how to translate realism into interactive space while keeping that sense of “I’m still playing a game.” That’s what inspires us—that we can make another game set in Poland. And we can use a different time period, or a different part of Krakow, like Nowa Huta. That excites us way more than trying to make a game about Italy or some made-up world. We’d rather take what’s already here—and dial it up like crazy.

GL: That way it’s authentic. People appreciate truth. And yeah, we’re taking a small risk, because I think Polish players are a bit hypersensitive to “local themes.” Especially when it reminds them of being dragged to boring school screenings of required-reading adaptations where they were force-fed Polish history.

HS: …The schools will play this one too.

GL: [smiling] But we’ve kind of figured out the golden middle ground—where showing Poland still feels fun and entertaining, while also being understandable for Western audiences.

WP: We got great feedback from international players at various events—even in places I didn’t expect. We brought Observer to Japan, and someone told us: “Wow, this world feels so exotic to me. Incredible.”

GL: Wojtek has a statue in Japan.

JZ: He unfolds like a Gundam.

WP [with a pokerface]: We want Cronos to be like Yakuza, which works as the cheapest ticket to Japan. Except here, it’s the cheapest ticket to Poland.

GL: Remember how, ten years ago, Scandinavian thrillers were all the rage? So why not Polish survival horror?

HS: Why do you think you were the only ones who really embraced the Polish setting so much?

JZ: We’re slowly not the only ones anymore.

HS: But you were among the first—on this scale at least.

JZ: Hard to say. Maybe it was just that feeling—we wanted to do it. And it all kind of aligned. The right people came along, we had the budget, the timing worked out, and publishers were on board. Everyone felt: hey, this is cool, this is different, this is original. Observer convinced us it was possible. The Medium convinced us even more.

WP: I still remember the design meetings back on Observer. We were talking with the art director and decided to mix the Polish People’s Republic aesthetic with cyberpunk—and it just worked.

GL: People found it super exotic in the West, because it’s such an unusual combo. And here in Poland, no one really thought it would work—but Bloober took the risk, poured money into it, and it paid off.

JZ: We stopped being allergic to Poland.

HS: That’s a great title—thanks! Speaking of Poland, I spotted references to Jaruzelski. Any chance we’ll see something about Walesa too?

All: Gotta look for it. Go dig.

HS: A-ha! Speaking of digging—I noticed the personality quiz at the beginning. Is that going to be a cheeky red herring, like picking Elizabeth’s brooch in BioShock Infinite? Or does it actually matter?

All three: Every good story delivers some kind of pay-off.

HS: Just like Chekhov’s gun.

All three: Exactly.

HS: Can’t wait for it to go off.