Cronos: The New Dawn Is Heavily Influenced by Silent Hill 2 and FromSoftware Games

Cronos: The New Dawn, the upcoming horror game from Bloober Team, immediately evokes Dead Space with its armored protagonist creeping through a derelict structure. But many of its other influences are more than visual similarities that are easy to point out. Bloober explained how this sci-fi horror shooter slated for fall 2025 is pulling from games like Silent Hill 2, the many titles from FromSoftware, and more.

However, some of Silent Hill 2‘s influence came from showing the team what not to do. Lead writer Grzegorz Like said at a recent preview event that Bloober analyzed the Silent Hill 2 remake and concluded the studio shouldn’t repeat itself for its next game. This mystery project needed to go in a slightly different direction with its narrative and touch on broader topics that are outside of one sad man’s psyche.

“When Silent Hill 2 was in production, we knew that we needed to introduce something that would entertain and make people think in a different way,” said Like. “Silent Hill 2 dove into the psychology of James. We decided we needed some other things [for Cronos]. We needed to ask other questions, so we went more philosophical with things and, because of the sci-fi nature and time travel, we had this opportunity to ask questions about humanity and the cosmic grandeur of human life.”

Some of these topics relate to Poland’s history and its relationship with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, both of which got the team to ask questions about unity versus individualism. These themes came up in the merging mechanics — enemies can suck up other corpses to gain new powers — and branched out from there. It started out as a gameplay hook but then had natural parallels to a story asking questions about coming together. This cohesion between narrative and gameplay inspired the team go keep going and make a deeper game with all sorts of interconnected threads.

“What Silent Hill 2 does well is that it has many meanings and everything revolves around the main topic,” said Like. “We really wanted to do that in Cronos and have this DNA that lets players dig deep into this game. And when you have questions — and, believe me, this game has more questions than answers — you will see clues and go on Reddit and be like, ‘I know everything now!’”

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Some of these questions will come from the way in which Cronos tells its story because it’ll be slightly less direct than Bloober’s recent games. The team looked at titles from FromSoftware, as well as Returnal, developer Housemarque’s acclaimed PS5 debut. Those games require players to do some critical thinking and exploring to come to their version of the truth. Game director Jacek Zięba explained these inspirations and how players will probably have to collaborate to complete their theories in Cronos.

“Silent Hill 2’s philosophy is in all of our horror games, even in Layers of Fear and The Medium, so we are still on that boat,” said Zięba. “But at the same time, with Cronos we looked a little into FromSoftware games, so there is heavy lore. You can find it, but you need to look. People will have theories, and we hope they will exchange them and find the right ones.”

Narratives in these types of games become more clear as players replay them. Smaller details gather new meanings once they’re examined a second, third, or possibly fourth time. Silent Hill 2 in particular is still being discussed decades later, and Bloober only contributed to those discussions in its remake. All the added lore and extra context only incentivized players to keep digging. Like said he hopes that players will look at Cronos the same way since the writers “did their homework” and made a game with enough to sift through after multiple runs.

“If you replay the game — and luckily, it’s not too long, so you will have an itch to do that — when you meet characters or see details in cutscenes, you will see them in a completely different context,” said Like.