Game Con Canada is marking a milestone this year by hosting its first-ever studio showcase, and fittingly, Cronos: The New Dawn will be stepping into that spotlight. For Bloober Team, known for exploring the psychological edges of horror, this won’t be just another demo reel. It will be a chance to introduce something riskier and more ambitious to a brand-new audience.
We spoke with Game Director at Bloober Team, Jacek Zieba, about what it means to debut Cronos in front of Canadian fans, how the project evolved from two competing ideas into a tightly wound descent into post-apocalyptic dread, and why 1980s Poland. With all its tension, unrest, and architecture, it felt like the perfect place to start pulling at the seams of reality.
This is the first-ever studio showcase at Game Con Canada. What did it mean to the team to be part of that debut, and how does it feel to represent the evolution of horror games with Cronos: The New Dawn on that kind of stage?
Jacek Zieba: It’s our first time at Game Con Canada, and we’re thrilled and excited. Sharing Cronos with the Canadian community is huge for us. Every event pulls us closer to the players and their reaction/feedback… and the games we’ve created. We love it.
How did you get involved with Game Con Canada, and what can attendees expect from The Bloober Team?
Jacek Zieba: This time, we were invited with Cronos—and it was hard to say no to such a fantastic opportunity. We’re showcasing our trailer, and we also have a little surprise for the fans.
Cronos: The New Dawn is putting together some very interesting concepts: time travel, post-apocalyptic horror, and history in Eastern Europe. How did it evolve from initial pitch to what we’re seeing now?
Jacek Zieba: At the beginning, we started with two separate pitches — one was about an Eastern European setting with a strange disease that morphs people, and the second was about time travel from a post-apocalyptic world to the time before “the end” to extract people who didn’t survive the apocalypse. And having these two together, we decided to merge them into one pitch! And to this day, all basic fundamentals are still in the game, so it’s not evolved so much; we just make it true. Make it real.
You’ve set Cronos: The New Dawn in 1980s Poland. What drew the team to that era specifically?
Jacek Zieba: The 1980s in Poland were a time of deep political unrest and uncertainty—a strange, heavy atmosphere that felt almost surreal at times. It was a decade marked by tension, resistance, and a lingering sense of something hidden beneath the surface. That kind of mood is exactly what Cronos thrives on. We draw heavily from that atmosphere—it’s gritty, mysterious, and emotionally charged, which makes it perfect for psychological horror.
On top of that, the game is set in Nowa Huta, a district with its own unique history and character. Built as a model socialist city, it carries the weight of ideological conflict and architectural contradiction. It’s not just a backdrop—it’s almost a character in itself.
Time travel is notoriously hard to wrangle narratively with so many moving parts, paradoxes, and narrative pitfalls. How did the writing team tackle that challenge while still keeping the story grounded and coherent?
Jacek Zieba: The biggest challenge was to decide HOW our time travel should work, and after that, the second biggest challenge was to stick to this idea as much as possible. In case of what you can expect, I think DARK, the Netflix TV series, can be an answer — it was a big and important reference during story creation on time travel rules.
The Orphans in Cronos: The New Dawn are disturbing and somehow tragically human. From both a design and narrative perspective, what went into crafting their presence in the world, and how do they function as more than just a threat?
Jacek Zieba: When designing the creatures and their function in this world, we ask ourselves how a monster created only from human flesh can look like? How they will be different depending on “from how many humans they are created”? If they still think they are human or they accepted their new nature, how this can affect their visual presence? What’s happening in their heads if the people that merge are locked inside with a constant internal fight between different selves?
And with our Orphans, we answer all of these questions. But I don’t want to spoil too much now, going into more details. You need to play the game and see for yourself!
The protagonist’s bulky diving gear immediately stands out as something almost ritualistic. What can you share about their role in the Collective and how their perspective is important to the story?
Jacek Zieba: The Traveler is the beating heart of the narrative. His suit isn’t just attire—it’s a symbol, a signal of purpose. As the designated Agent of the enigmatic Collective, he carries The Harvester, a powerful device capable of reaching through time itself to extract individuals from the past.
From the outside, Cronos feels like new ground for Bloober. More ambitious, maybe even riskier. But should fans expect that signature environmental storytelling and psychological trickery that the studio has become known for?
Jacek Zieba: Absolutely. That’s what we do. Cronos takes some bold steps forward, but we’re not leaving our roots behind. Psychological tension, environmental storytelling—that’s still at the core. It’s how we see horror, and it’s what fans can count on.
Survival horror only really works when tension between fear and control is balanced. How did the writing and design teams work together on Cronos: The New Dawn to make sure that the story beats and gameplay work together to create this balance?
Jacek Zieba: At first glance, the story part in Cronos, it’s not an easy one, as most good time travel stories should be. With each new iteration of story, our writing team presents all beats to the rest of the team, time after time after time, to be sure we are all on the same page here. Then all the designers do their work in case of levels, mechanics, and combats, and then the writing team plays the game time after time after time to be sure that all the beats landed when and where they should.
The whole idea of preventing enemies from merging is intriguing and kind of horrifying in its implications. Can you break down how that mechanic feeds into the moment-to-moment tension of the game?
Jacek Zieba: Depends on the scenario you will run in, but let’s go with “simple” combat. You encounter two enemies. You kill one of them — now you create a “fuel” — whoever eats this dead body will become stronger. The second enemy starts to merge with the dead one. You really don’t want this to happen — so it’s your move. You can try to land a critical hit with your gun, or you can run close to the monster and use the flamethrower — this way, you will interrupt the merge and burn the dead body at the same time, if you position yourself correctly.
If you fail any of that, they will merge — the monster becomes stronger and harder to kill, and you will have a new riddle to solve — and it depends on you and your playstyle how you want to approach that. Here it’s only a very simple example, but start thinking what if there were more monsters at the beginning, or there was one dead body (or more) on the ground from the beginning, etc. It can really snowball fast, and sometimes one mistake can take you to very different and unexpected combat scenarios. Remember — Don’t let them merge
Every game has its big creative hurdle. Was there one particular challenge, narrative, mechanical, or thematic in Cronos: The New Dawn that really tested the team during development?
Jacek Zieba: Merge system — of all monsters can do it, how long it should take, how easy or hard it should be to stop it, how much enemies one monster can “eat”. How much they can change and grow. How many different attributes they can share between each other, and a lot of different questions, blind spots, and riddles that we need to have answers for to bring it (merge system) to life.
Stories rarely survive development unscathed. Did Cronos: The New Dawn go through any major narrative rewrites, and if so, what drove those changes, and what did the team take away from that process?
Jacek Zieba: Yes. After a couple of the first months of development, we decided to restart the story. The main reason was that what we had at that time had a couple of cool story moments, but they were really hard to glue together and overall, not worth it to base the whole story on it. Also, it was even more complex than what we have now (or I want to believe that). It was also a bit disconnected from the player.
So, we decide to rewrite it, make it more personal, to make you lost in this world but at the same time to connect you with characters, how they are changing during the game and also to solve what happened to this world and why and what your character role was in all of that?
Cronos: The New Dawn doesn’t shout. It lingers. The kind of horror that seeps into the corners of your mind long after the screen goes dark. There’s a confidence to what Bloober Team is doing here, not just in the world-building or the mechanics, but in the silence between moments. It’s not just scary. It’s unsettling in the way only something grounded in a real place in an alternate timeline with real tension can be.
Showcasing it at Game Con Canada doesn’t just give players a first look, it gives them a warning. Cronos is coming, and it’s not interested in holding your hand. It wants to pull you under.
